> the thing about "manually specified" anchors is that they will show > all kinds of idiosyncrasies. so not only are they work to create, but > they are also inconsistent, thus undependable, meaning you have to > look at each one to see what it is, so they have almost _no_ redeeming > qualities at all.
Yeah, totally agreed. There are so many advantages to the fact that the anchor is dependably derived from the text of the heading… well, between all the sites that use the same Markdown processor configured in the same way… anyway, that complete consistency is very useful. It means that if you want to link to the heading, then all you have to do is copy-paste the text of the heading and then manually edit it into the format that the Markdown processor uses. You don’t need to look up the anchor to copy-paste it, which would just be dumb. It’s also a huge help if you want to know where a link goes – you don’t even need to click the link (who does that anyway?!), you just scroll through the document from top to bottom while eyeballing the headers and hey presto: you know *exactly* where it leads. Furthermore, in the post-Web 2.0 era URIs are only cool if they could potentially break before you notice that they are trending. So the fact that links will break if you edit the text of a heading means derived anchors are make cool URIs. Really cool URIs sometimes. So it’s easy to show conclusively that derived anchors are perfect in every way and the absolute idiosyncrasy of manually specified anchors results in no redeeming qualities for them at all. _______________________________________________ Markdown-Discuss mailing list Markdown-Discuss@six.pairlist.net https://pairlist6.pair.net/mailman/listinfo/markdown-discuss
