This is an archived snapshot of W3C's public bugzilla bug tracker, decommissioned in April 2019. Please see the home page for more details.
Created attachment 786 [details] xhtml page with reported error. I was attempting to use a <a name="name"></a> tag in a strict XHTML 1.1 document and the validator was telling me I couldn't - 'Attribute "name" exists, but can not be used for this element.'. I now know that that's because you're supposed to use ID instead of name with XHTML. Fine. However, I had many '<a name="xyz">' tags scattered around my document, but the validator only reported an error for the first one. This is a problem because it implies the rest are fine and I spend 5-10 mins wondering why that first one was bad but the rest were good. See attached - it has three '<a name' tags, but only the first is ever reported.
The validator intentionally tells the underlying parser to suppress "duplicate" errors, in an attempt to be more helpful. Arguments can be made both ways and FWIW I don't personally have a strong opinion either way, but because this is the intended behavior at the moment (and has been for a long time), it's not currently a bug but a feature and thus I'm closing this issue here. I suggest discussing this further on the www-validator mailing list in case you feel strongly that the current behavior should change.