Next project
Well, AKMA is humming along with his Movable Type installation, so I’m at loose ends for something to do.
I happened upon Tish in the comments to another site, asking for help with permalinks. I explained a bit about fragment identifiers to her; she got them working, and explained to me that she’d tried a Movable Type install but hadn’t had any luck.
So that’s my next markover project. Rubbing my hands together in anticipation…
Oh, fragment identifiers? This is an HTML thing. Remember how I explained about id and a name? In purely functional terms they accomplish the same goal, marking something to be pointed at from elsewhere. I never talked about how to do the pointing.
To point to a web page as a whole, you simply put its URL in the href attribute on the a element. To point to CavLec, for example, you would use the tag <a href="http://yarinareth.net/caveatlector/index.html>. (Note that in XHTML 2.0, the href attribute will be allowed on practically all elements, not just a, letting you turn anything into a link. Cool, huh?)
To point to part of a page, that page-part has to have either an id attribute or an a element with a name attribute. How do you find out? You have to view source, I’m afraid. A really cool browser stunt would be to have a mode that searches a page for identifiers and then exposes them visually somehow for easy linking. (Sort of the way modern journals put bibliographic information for articles at the bottom of the first page of the article.)
I don’t know of any browser that does this, but perhaps one could write a Javascript gizmo that would do it. This would be a cool thing for ebooks, too—point, click, wham! there’s an XPath/XPointer expression that will reliably take you to that spot in the book. Pretty doable, I think, and it solves the citation problem that ebooks-in-academia users complain about.
Off-track, sorry. Once you have the id or a name value for the page-part you want, you attach it to the page’s URL with a hash mark (pound sign, whatever, a #, shift-3 on most keyboards). CavLec’s archives listing in the sidebar has the id archives, so to link directly there (for some weird reason), you would use the tag <a href="http:// yarinareth.net/caveatlector/index.html#archives">.
The #archives part of the URL is often called a “fragment identifier” for reasonably intuitive reasons. And there you are.