[pmwiki-users] Visble anchors (Re: FAQ Page Layout)

[Joachim Durchholz]

Neil Herber wrote:

> At 2005-08-04  06:49 PM +0200, chr at home.se is rumored to have said:
> 
>> So in short, I think the FAQ should have visible anchors. As for a link
>> that goes back to the TOC, that's useful for those people who don't feel
>> like pressing the HOME key... :-)
> 
> 
> If the FAQ has a TOC, then the link that the TOC provides points 
> directly to the (invisible) anchor. In Firefox under Windoze, you can 
> right-click on a link and select "Copy Link Location" which you then 
> paste into the email. I hope that all other browsers work the same way.
> 
> Having a visible anchor does not provide this facility - rather, it lets 
> the reader see where the anchor is. (Unless I grossly misunderstand 
> visible anchors). In a FAQ, the target will always be the question, so a 
> visible anchor is just redundant page decoration.

The visible anchor still has an advantage: if you found the information, 
somewhere down the middle of the page, you know you can give people a 
link that points directly to the middle of the page. Without having to 
go back and find out whether there's a ToC, or which entry in the ToC 
points to a given paragraph (one *might* assume that the ToC tells you, 
but titles can be misleading, ambiguous, or simply wrong - I'd have to 
check that the ToC entry indeed points to the right paragraph, and 
mostly I don't want to bother with that).

Though I think it's neglect of the browser vendors that anchors aren't 
visible by default. (Luckily, it's easy to set up a style sheet that 
does it.)

Of course, the one thing that a visible anchor *still* doesn't provide 
is the link location. One would have to make each anchor a link to 
itself. Doing that by CSS might be possible, otherwise PmWiki would have 
to generate the appropriate markup.
If we want to follow down that route, that is :-)

Regards,
Jo