anchor names from headers (Setext and atx)?

[Michel Fortin]

Le 2007-09-22 à 14:22, Jeremy C. Reed a écrit :


> <a name="This is an H2"/>


Be careful with that. The `/>` terminator is only recognised by  
browsers when using the XML parser, which is to say when you send  
your document with an XML mime type (text/xml, application/xml,  
application/xhtml+xml). For the HTML parser (text/html), the markup  
above will be an unclosed anchor tag, and will span until the next  
opening anchor tag unless a corresponding closing tag (`</a>`) is found.

If your anchor is not a link, there will be few side effects beside a  
strange DOM tree inside the browser. That's unless you have some CSS  
rule defined for tag "a". For an example of this: go to the [Markdown  
project page][1] on Daring Fireball, move your mouse pointer over the  
first words in the paragraphs following the "Discussion List" and  
"Installation and Requirements" headers and you'll see some  
unexpected rollover effects.

[1]: http://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/


The correct way to write an anchor (so that it can be read by HTML  
parsers) is to close it with an explicit closing tag:

     <a name="anchor-name"></a>


Michel Fortin
michel.fortin at michelf.com
http://michelf.com/