html footnotes stopped working

Can you link to a broken page?

Actually, here is a page that uses the above code. However, as you’ll note, it works. This was published before 3.2 came out. But here’s the odd thing… if I go into admin and open that post up, the code immediately and automatically changes to:

<sup><a name="id1" href="#ftn.id1"></a>1</sup>

and

<sup><a name="ftn.id1" href="#id1"></a>1</sup>

And it stops working as well.

Thanks for looking at it.

Have you had a chance to have a look at this? Any suggestions on what I might pursue as a solution?

Ok. I’ve found the solution and will log it here for any other hapless souls who wander down this path.

First, I narrowed the problem down to the following:

Here’s the deal. When I go into the html view of my wp and type in the following code:

<a name="1">Text</a>

And then click normal view and click back to html view, the code changes automatically to:

<a name="1"></a>Text

It does not do this for other people, but it consistently does it for me. Here is some additional info:

It started with wp 3.2
It happens across different computers with different ip addresses
It happens in IE, Firefox, and Chrome
It happens when I log in under different users

Why does this happen and how can I get it to stop happening?

Second, I went to “wp questions” and got the following two responses which solved the issue and explained it:

I can confirm that this problem exists. I am using WordPress 3.2.1 with no plugins and the default theme and I am also affected by this issue.

Steps to reproduce:
– Go edit a post
– Switch to the HTML-editor and enter this exact text: <a name="1">test</a>
– Switch back to the Wysiwyg-editor and again to the HTML-editor
– The code is now changed to <a name="1"></a>test

I think this is a issue with how TinyMCE handles these anchors. I have found the following possible simple solution:

Use the id-attribute instead of name: <a id="some_id">test</a> works and allows you to jump to that point on the page just like does.

This is related to the tinyMC XHTML behaviour; it forces the use of HTML Standard Attributes the “name” attribute is optional for the anchor tag.
This issue was already reported on the wordpress trac and the conclusion is:
From HTML point of view <a name="bob">Inside</a> is exactly the same as <a name="bob"></a>Inside. The anchor is a hidden pointer to where the page should scroll when accessed with https://someurl#anchor.
One question; Why you want to use the name attribute? Maybe you should be using the ID attribute.
hope it helps ??

Just looked over this and realised I might come across as having sorted out step one on my own. I didn’t. I got some excellent help from one George Yap.

Good to see you’re still finding and sharing the answers to life’s questions…;)

Hey there,

I am not a computer guy so basically none of that means anything to me. What I do know is that I my footnote coding (created by livewriter, etc) is being stripped whenever I move to visual editor. I think this is crazy and an impossible situation. I cant do all my editing only in html mode.

It was working fine for years, and then bam! it all stops.

Has there been a layman’s solution to this?

@dflynn,

Here’s something to try:

In html view (before you go to visual editor), just change the “name” to “id.” Then go to visual editor and see if it works…