Brion Vibber brion@pobox.com writes:
As I recall, the primary argument against anchors is that they support and encourage long pages.
Very long pages are bad, but pages up to 20 or 30 KB are perfectly okay and there fragment links (#fragment) are very useful. Short articles suffering from the fact that they are often nothing more than a list of pointers to other articles (internal and external) ;)
Also they are to easy to edit. Thus poeple always add stupid lists of terms and names to short articles ;-)
(And of course, very long pages can run afoul of browser limitations, making it impossible for some people to edit them.)
What's a very long article? We should encourage people to go for proper editors. I'll evaluate Emacs solutions the next weeks. Any advice?
The preferred solution is to break up long articles into smaller, more self-contained blocks.
I simply disagree :) Short page maybe easy to edit (caveat, see above) and they are a pain to read. Esp. when Internet connection isn't that good. Even here in Germany at certain times it can happen that I must more than 30-45 seconds for an article. Bandwidth here isn't the problem.
Anchors, of course, would potentially simplify internal navigation -- for readers only. When it comes time to change a small paragraph in the middle of a 25kb article through a tiny textarea in a web page, you gotta do a lot of scrolling. Short pages are much easier to work with, and as a wiki project that's committed to being read-write, editing ease is of great importance to us.
Yes, but 25kb articles are perfectly okay. I'd say the barrier should be something like 30-50kb, depending on pictures includes etc. One should judge form case to case.