Inspect script finds many Docutils-generated duplicate bookmarks

[Jeremiah Willcock]

It seems that several libraries with autogenerated documentation contain things like:

<h3 id="foo"><a name="foo" id="foo">...</a></h3>

These are found to be duplicate bookmarks by the inspect script. Should these be skipped by the tool, or are they legitimate issues with the HTML?

[Daniel James]

That's a legitimate issue. Id's in a html document should be unique. I'm surprised that docutils would generate such markup, there's probably some configuration to stop it, or the generated documentation could be run through tidy.

[John Maddock]

I believe this should be reported to the docutils guys - it appears not to be within our control to fix this?

Closing down for now.

John.

[Daniel James]

Looking at the MPL documentation, inspect seems to be complaining about things like:

<div class="section" id="the-problem">
<h2><a name="the-problem">The Problem</a></h2>
...
</div>

which is valid, since both the name and id attributes are unique. IIRC modern browsers will use the id and ignore the name in this case. Although, it's a pain for inspect to recognise that the id and name are basically at the same point. I also try to avoid putting any content inside anchors used as bookmarks, as it makes them look like links, when they aren't (you can see this in the MPL documentation).

Inspect is probably wrong to complain about this case, but it's not very good use of html.