On Mon, Dec 22, 2008 at 5:34 AM, Mark Clements (HappyDog) gmane@kennel17.co.uk wrote:
It is possible to have several identical headings on a page, but you are not allowed to have duplicate id attributes within a page, so it's not as simple as just using the section name as is currently the case. Note that duplicate values for the 'name' attribute is perfectly valid HTML
No, it's not.
"This attribute names the current anchor so that it may be the destination of another link. The value of this attribute must be a unique anchor name. The scope of this name is the current document. Note that this attribute shares the same name space as the id attribute." http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/struct/links.html#h-12.2
The name attribute not only must be unique, but shares its namespace with the id attribute, so any uniqueness problems with id's would have already existed with names.
On Mon, Dec 22, 2008 at 9:36 AM, Mark Clements (HappyDog) gmane@kennel17.co.uk wrote:
But then section links will be incorrect if the order of the duplicate headings changes.
This is and always has been true. Of course, the same problem occurs in the (far more common) case that an existing section is renamed or deleted outright. Sections in MediaWiki are not versioned and are accorded no permanence. This is reasonable enough, since their content is routinely moved around the page. A permanent link to a section isn't worth much if the page is refactored and half the content is in some other section.