On Tue, 2003-03-04 at 20:42, Lee Daniel Crocker wrote:
Internal anchors were a feature I added and then removed by the consensus of the community. If you can come up with a /really good/ example of how an internal anchor will make an article better in a way that can't be done without it, and won't sacrific simplicity of editing, then I'm certainly open to putting the feature back.
As I recall, the primary argument against anchors is that they support and encourage long pages.
Long pages, in turn, are frowned upon because they're difficult to navigate internally and intimidating to edit. (And of course, very long pages can run afoul of browser limitations, making it impossible for some people to edit them.)
The preferred solution is to break up long articles into smaller, more self-contained blocks.
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.
-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)