Difference between id and name attributes in HTML

Question

What is the difference between the id and name attributes? They both seem to serve the same purpose of providing an identifier.

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Answer 1

See this http://mindprod.com/jgloss/htmlforms.html#IDVSNAME

What’s the difference? The short answer is, use both and don’t worry about it. But if you want to understand this goofiness, here’s the skinny:

id= is for use as a target like this: for links like this: .

name= is also used to label the fields in the message send to a server with an HTTP (HyperText Transfer Protocol) GET or POST when you hit submit in a form.

id= labels the fields for use by JavaScript and Java DOM (Document Object Model). The names in name= must be unique within a form. The names in id= must be unique within the entire document.

Sometimes the name= and id= names will differ, because the server is expecting the same name from various forms in the same document or various radio buttons in the same form as in the example above. The id= must be unique; the name= must not be.

JavaScript needed unique names, but there were too many documents already out here without unique name= names, so the W3 people invented the id tag that was required to be unique. Unfortunately older browsers did not understand it. So you need both naming schemes in your forms.

NOTE: attribute "name" for some tags like is not supported in HTML5.