I took this out of the w3c XHTML recommendation

HTML 4 defined the name attribute for the elements a, applet, form, frame, iframe, img, and map. HTML 4 also introduced the id attribute. Both of these attributes are designed to be used as fragment identifiers.

In XML, fragment identifiers are of type ID, and there can only be a single attribute of type ID per element. Therefore, in XHTML 1.0 the id attribute is defined to be of type ID. In order to ensure that XHTML 1.0 documents are well-structured XML documents, XHTML 1.0 documents MUST use the id attribute when defining fragment identifiers on the elements listed above. See the HTML Compatibility Guidelines for information on ensuring such anchors are backward compatible when serving XHTML documents as media type text/html.

Note that in XHTML 1.0, the name attribute of these elements is formally deprecated, and will be removed in a subsequent version of XHTML.

Can someone put this in english for me, I guess Im not as smart as I thought. I was switching over to using all ID and not using NAME anymore but I ran into problems when I was doing that. What is the actual rule of when you are supposed to use id and when you are supposed to use name?

Id is just an attribute, it doesn't do anything unless it has styles applied to it. An id must be unique, never repeated on the page. This is especially important since id is an important hook for JavaScript.

Name is needed on form elements, as its values are sent as form data when the form is submitted.

Can you start writing the w3c recommendations? Why couldnt they just say it like that lol. Thanks