An idea for within document anchor references

[Fletcher T. Penney]

John et al,

     When I was playing around with my own version of Markdown, and  
using it for my wiki, I realized that I really wanted to be able to  
create anchors to headers within a file.

     My solution to that was to modify the header output so that each  
header is attached to an id tag:

         <h3 id="someheadertext">Some Header Text</h3>

     The header tag is simply the concatenated form of the header,  
with invalid punctuation characters removed (keeping it valid XHTML).

     To reference a given header, simply use the header as the id tag  
for a reference style link (either implicit or not):

     Link to [Some Header Text][].

     If you already used that text to define a link, that is used  
instead.


What do you (and others) think about this?  I really like being able  
to include within document references in the markdown document  
itself, without hand-coding it in html.

I realize that this could cause problems when displaying multiple  
markdown documents on a single page that share header titles (in a  
weblog, for instance), and I suppose that a similar solution could be  
employed as whatever is decided on things like footnotes.



Fletcher

-- 
Fletcher T. Penney
fletcher at alumni.duke.edu

After I'm dead, I'd rather have people ask why I have no monument than
why I have one.
         - Marcus Porcius Cato


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