changing the "name" attribute of an item doesn't seem to be working when trying to change it with .attr();

changing the "name" attribute of an item doesn't seem to be working when trying to change it with .attr();

I don't know why but it's not working no matter how much i try to do it. I was planning on posting some elements on a page's div and one of them allows for mutiple things going on at once, as in allows for someone to have more than one of something. And since i don't think that it'll be working right if i try to pull it from 1+ items with the same name it'd just show the last one? Or is it that PHP would show them as a list... either way it's seeming that .attr() doesn't allow for a name change for some odd reason. And i was wondering if there was any function to allow for this to be changed easily written within jquery.