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The description of the form element's name attribute reads: ⓘ name = string The name part of the name/value pair associated with this element for the purposes of form submission. http://dev.w3.org/html5/markup/form.html#form.attrs.name This description is the same as the description of the name attribute of form input fields, which is right. But it does not apply to the form element itself. The specification has a correct definition: The name attribute represents the form's name within the forms collection. The value must not be the empty string, and the value must be unique amongst the form elements in the forms collection that it is in, if any. http://www.w3.org/TR/html5/forms.html#the-form-element
Thanks for catching this. I have checked in a fix: http://dev.w3.org/cvsweb/html5/markup/elements/form.html.diff?r1=1.9;r2=1.10;f=h And the update is live now: http://dev.w3.org/html5/markup/form.html#form.attrs.name Note that parts of this document are generated from the schema was use for the W3C Nu Markup Validator. And in that schema, we are currently not doing the check for "The value must not be the empty string, and the value must be unique amongst the form elements in the forms collection that it is in, if any." constraint. Once I add it to the schema code, it will automatically also get generated as part of the documentation. In the mean time, I've filed a bug for that: http://bugzilla.validator.nu/show_bug.cgi?id=903