(Its also a good idea to give them ids so you can reference them with label elements, but the ids and names do not have to be the same.)

and, to make things even more confusing -- ids need to be unique through the page, but names don't.

It makes sense, when you think about it in terms of items that repeat, such as checkboxes or radio buttons, but you might also have more than one form on the page, which contains elements that overlap names ... but you can't duplicate ids. (well, you can, but not if you want it to be valid)