does fireball markdown support anchor links?

[Alan Hogan]

This topic actually just came up at work a few days ago. I had manually
inserted named links, aka anchors, into a README.md file.

In the code review on my check-in, someone suggested I use "the same
format we are already using for the rest of the headings" for
"consistency."

Puzzled at first, I realized GitHub was automatically generating IDs
(and floating link icons, on render) to enable section links.

(No, this is not part of GFM, Github Flavored Markdown. It seems to be a
subsequent step.)

I went ahead and deleted my ugly manual anchors, because Github *does*
already provide this, and it made the source cleaner.

The downside of this is that now the links I made to various sections
will not work if viewed outside of Github (e.g., if someone edits it
with a preview on the local computer).

As I wrote  at work --

Generating section links is **not** part of Markdown such as it’s
defined [by Gruber], and various markdown implementations either do it
differently, or not at all.

<h3 id="mysectionname">My Section Name</h3> <!-- showdown --> <h3 id="my-section-
name">My Section Name</h3> <!-- pandoc, kramdown --> <h3
id="my_section_name">My Section Name</h3> <!-- maruku -->
<h3>My Section Name</h3> <!-- most markdown convertors -->

As bowerbird mentioned, there is no consistency (hey, there’s that word
again) in  these auto-generated IDs.

Notably, most implementations do not do it at all (as would be expected,
given that original Markdown does not, either).

See the above example for yourself on Babelmark 2:
http://ajh.us/babelmark2-section-ids

Cheers,

Alan Hogan
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