On Thu, 29 May 2003, Neil Harris wrote:
My current favorite suggestion is that second-level headings (H2) should automatically become link targets.
I agree; this is the "obvious right thing" to do, in my opinion. We can now argue about whether we should support references for these anchors as [[article#fragment-text]], which also seems to be the "obvious thing" ?
I think that the very idea of linking to sections within articles is the obvious *wrong* thing to do. The opening paragraph of an article is the thing that establishes the subject matter and the context - basically, what the article is all about. We can't just throw people into the middle of an article and expect them to know what's going on. They'll have to scroll back up to the top again anyway to check. If we don't want to just confuse people, we'd have to make each section pretty much self-contained. Hmm, a piece of writing that is self-contained and that you can link to. Sounds like an article to me! If a section is autonomous enough to be linked to, it is far more natural to separate it out and make it an article all by itself than to give it some strange new semi-article status.
I think this is a case of people looking for technical solutions to a problem that could be solved much more satisfactorily by sensible planning by humans.
Oliver
+-------------------------------------------+ | Oliver Pereira | | Dept. of Electronics and Computer Science | | University of Southampton | | omp199@ecs.soton.ac.uk | +-------------------------------------------+