hyperlink - Should I make HTML Anchors with 'name' or 'id'?

Question

When one wants to refer to some part of a webpage with the "http://example.com/#foo" method, should one use

<h1><a name="foo"/>Foo Title</h1>

or

<h1 id="foo">Foo Title</h1>

They both work, but are they equal, or do they have semantic differences?

Answer 1

According to the HTML 5 specification, 5.9.8 Navigating to a fragment identifier:

For HTML documents (and the text/html MIME type), the following processing model must be followed to determine what the indicated part of the document is.

1. Parse the URL, and let fragid be the <fragment> component of the URL.
2. If fragid is the empty string, then the indicated part of the document is the top of the document.
3. If there is an element in the DOM that has an ID exactly equal to fragid, then the first such element in tree order is the indicated part of the document; stop the algorithm here.
4. If there is an a element in the DOM that has a name attribute whose value is exactly equal to fragid, then the first such element in tree order is the indicated part of the document; stop the algorithm here.
5. Otherwise, there is no indicated part of the document.

So, it will look for id="foo", and then will follow to name="foo"

Edit: As pointed out by @hsivonen, in HTML5 the a element has no name attribute. However, the above rules still apply to other named elements.