An idea for within document anchor references

[Michel Fortin]

John Gruber wrote:


> The idea would be:

>

>     ## This is a header ##

>

>     Blah blah blah.

>

>     ...

>

>     Blah blah, see "[This is a header][#]" for more info.


I'm okay with this, as long as this form is simply a shortcut for:

     Blah blah, see "[This is a header][#This is a header]" for more  
info.

This way, there is logic in it: it works almost the same way as  
regular reference links (using only "#" is a shortcut for when your  
link text is the same as the reference).

But it doesn't solve the issue of auto-generating ids. You say they  
get "some sort of GUID id attribute", but how do you generate user- 
friendly clash-free GUIDs?

Anyway, I would pretty much like define myself the id attributes for  
my headers like this:

     ## This is a header ##                 {#head}

Then, these three links would mean the same thing.

     Blah blah, see "[This is a header][#]" for more info.

     Blah blah, see "[This is a header][#This is a header]" for more  
info.

     Blah blah, see "[This is a header](#head)" for more info.

The question is: Do we really need to add the special link-to-header  
syntax -- which doesn't work when two headers have the same text --  
when all we need is the ability to set ids to headers?



Michel Fortin
michel.fortin at michelf.com
http://www.michelf.com/