Got bit by the IE id="tags" printing bug on Java.net today. Eric Meyer (of CSS fame) describes the bug on his blog here: Reserved ID Values?

Basically if a page has an html tag with with id="tags" as an attribute, when you try to print in IE you’ll get a fun error message:

And you can’t print the webpage.

Of course one of articles on Java.net had just that, so I removed the unnecessary id="tags" and lo and behold…the problem did not go away. So it took me some time to discover that name="tags" is also persona non grata in IE, something that hadn’t previously been described in Eric’s post.

So the moral of the story is, avoid using tags as the id or name of any HTML tag.

This post first appeared on From the Belly of the Beasts, a weblog from some of the people who build O’Reilly websites.