Question

My document is getting some errors when using the W3C validator because some of my <a> tags have “name” attributes. It says that the “name” attribute is obsolete. When and why did this happen???

Secondly, I am using rel="something" with a few links when using a certain jQuery functions. This is also causing validation errors as the “rel” tags are not “valid”.

So, the following link would throw two validation errors:

<a href="index.php" name="somename" rel="reltag">Link</a>

My question is, is this something I should concern myself with, or is the validator just being overly picky in this instance?

Answer 1

It says that the “name” attribute is obsolete. When and why did this happen?

HTML 4 (in around 1998) introduced a generic id attribute that did everything the name attribute on <a> elements did (except work in Netscape 4) but wasn’t limited to <a> elements. XHTML 1.1 officially deprecated name on <a>.

“rel” tags are not “valid”

The draft HTML 5 specification for rel is, frankly, a mess (it limits values to ones in the spec … and those in a wiki). However, most instances I’ve seen of JS using rel are using it incorrectly (as a generic place to store data and not as a place to describe a relationship between the current document and the document at the end of the link). Use class instead.