Brion Vibber wrote:
Toby Bartels wrote:
However, one discussion of policy has recently come up. That's over whether to allow links from article [[Z]] to section [[#Y]] in article [[X]], through the markup "[[X#Y]]"; or whether to allow links only from the same article [[X]], through the markup "[[#Y]]".
We have allowed such links since nearly a year ago, but you had to make an anchor yourself by putting in some HTML tag with an 'id="anchorname"' attribute.
We've allowed them, but only in anticipation; they weren't intended to work yet (or that wasn't publicly announced).
The discussion is whether to automatically _create_ anchors from headers, which is needed for Erik's proposed automatic table of contents generation for pages with more than three headers.
There hasn't been any controversy on <wikitech-L> over this as such; the controversy has been over whether or not we ought to now disable the [[X#Y]] links /when/ we do this.
The anchor names would change if the header text is changed, so if a header is changed, a link specifically to it will end up just going to the whole article instead of that section specifically.
For this reason (and your recent answer to my technical question), I think that we can stand to continue to allow [[X#Y]] -- especially since some wikis really want them. But individual wikis should think carefully about what the best practices in their case will be.
-- Toby