On Mon, 30 Jun 2003, Kurt Jansson wrote:
[snip]
To me this sounds frightening, and I'll leave
restructuring of articles
with anchors to others. And I guess I'm not the only one.
While I'm not very enthused about the idea of using volatile header text
as anchor names, I'm not nearly so worried about having anchors as you:
* If an anchor name changes, the link still takes you to the wrong part of
the right page, just as it does now.
* If an anchor-linked section is removed from an article and/or made into
a separate page, any anchor-links to it will fall on the old page, exactly
as they would now without the anchor link.
* Identifying pages which link to some particular anchor is no more
difficult than identifying pages which link to the page intending to point
the reader at some subsection but without being able to do it.
Programmatically it could be made much much easier, if someone cares to
make that additional feature.
Of course, maybe we *shouldn't* have pages so long that people feel
the need to anchor into them. But if we do, *AND WE DO RIGHT NOW*, is it a
crime to simplify the lives of people trying to read those pages at the
cost that, occasionally, a link might break and be no worse than it is
at present?
-- brion vibber (brion @
pobox.com)