The only serious reason to have the
name attribute is to use the control in a Web form. In this case, the HTTP request is sent by the button of the "submit" type, and the request data is formed as the set of key-value pairs, so the value of this attribute for each control is used as a key, and the
value — as a value. Please see:
http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/interact/forms.html#h-17.13.3[
^].
On the server side, with ASP.NET (I think your "C#5" tag indicates that you use it), you can use
System.Web.HttpRequest class to read the values through its
indexed property "this" in the form
Request["key"]:
https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.web.httprequest%28v=vs.110%29.aspx[
^],
https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/xc67sd5e%28v=vs.110%29.aspx[
^].
If you don't use a form to send HTTP request, you can use Ajax, and then you don't have to use this attribute, because you can explicitly submit any thinkable data, including the data read from any your controls on the page. Then you don't even have to have the
id attribute, because you can directly traverse the page's DOM tree using JavaScript and collect the data you want. You can find JavaScript DOM function in any JavaScript reference.
—SA
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