org-mode and following links to `#+name: target` things

Question

I have the following in my org-mode buffer:

#+name: my-element-name

and then I made a link to that:

and here is a link to [[my-element-name]].

According to the org-mode manual on internal links, that ought to work, but when I try to following the link with C-c C-o, I get an error: Wrong type argument: stringp, nil.

I'm using org 9.4 from ELPA; I've used edebug on some of the functions and it seems that something isn't working deep inside org-link-search but I couldn't figure out where. I see some regexp matching in that function...this seems like something that ought to work.

Using NAME instead of "name" didn't make a difference.

Is this expected to work? It seems like it.

(More generally, what's the difference between "dedicated targets" -- the ones <<like-this>> -- versus "named elements" with #+NAME: some-name-here?)

Answer 1

A name keyword is an "affiliated" keyword: it is affiliated to the following element, so it cannot exist on its own.

Try:

#+name: my-table
| a | b |

#+name: my-code-block
#+begin_src emacs-lisp
(message "foo")
#+end_src

[[my-table]]
[[my-code-block]]

If you do M-x org-lint in your buffer, you'll see something like this:

     6 low   Orphaned affiliated keyword: "NAME"
    17 high  Unknown fuzzy location "my-element-name"