...

BUT PLEASE: No anchors adressable from outside! There is nearly no

difference to subpages.

I think I understand your point,

That's good :-)

but I don't follow your argument. Accessibility from outside was never an important problem with

subpages.

The key problem with subpages is that they created a "hardcoded" link hierarchy, and that they create ambigous and overlaping logical namespaces. Should Chess be it's own article, or should it be Boardgames/Chess, or Strategy games/Chess? It's not at all obvious

that

allowing HTML anchors would create these problems.

Okay, that another (maybe even more important) argument against subpages. But we could have kept all the Articlename/History pages then (an others where the subpage is _only_ related to the subjetpage).

Perhaps I'm missing something, but I'd like to be able to see how --exactly-- anchors are "nearly indistinguishable" from subpages. If you see this more clearly than I, could you please explain it to me.

I'll try :-) First I just had a bad feeling then I heard of the idea, because in most suggestions they even looked like subpages. Than I started thinking why. My main point is: They make the Wikipedia-web more static. You don't know if there are links from outside to a certain anchor word, so you'll think twice before changing the text. But if you do so you need a "which pages link to this anchor word" function to correct all pages that point to the word. Maybe it's a bit easier if only heading can be anchors, but you might want to change them, too - or even restructure the whole article. Maybe we'll need anchors that redirect to other anchors. And a "most wanted anchor" function. Okay, maybe I'm exaggerating now, but I hope this was a bit clearer.

Could someone with better English write an article on meta: "Why anchors are evil"? - Of course after we have discussed this out.

But maybe I'm too pesimistic and it would be a great feature. But I have a really bad feeling about it.

Kurt