<a name="INTERNAL_LINK">Named Location</a>

These kinds of links are used to internally or externally jump to the named locations via anchors like:

<a href="#INTERNAL_LINK">My internal link.</a>

I'd like to propose to syntax enhancements to the Wiki syntax. The first of these is:

[#INTERNAL_LINK]
[#INTERNAL_LINK|My internal link.]

These would translate into the following respectively:

<a href="#INTERNAL_LINK">INTERNAL_LINK</a>
<a href="#INTERNAL_LINK">My internal link.</a>

The second piece of syntax is the actual label. I'd like to be able to drop an anchor without the clumsy HTML by doing this:

[@INTERNAL_LINK]
[@INTERNAL_LINK|My named anchor.]

This would translate directly into:

<a name="INTERNAL_LINK"></a>
<a name="INTERNAL_LINK">My named anchor.</a></code>

If you think the idea is sound, give a developer account to the userid "michael" and email me the password so I can try my hand at implementing it.

drh added on 2009-09-19 15:17:53:
Added the [#INTERNAL] form in check-in 3a4c7f60a27f. Bu the [@INTERNAL] is a new syntax that is not necessary and would be rarely used, so it is rejected.

anonymous added on 2009-09-21 04:54:40:
I'm puzzled by how the [#LINK] form would be useful but [@LINK] not.

Consider a sizable documentation page written in the wiki format. I'd have headers for each section and I'd likely want a ToC at the top for them. Currently I'd have to do them this way:

...ToC...
  *  [#SECTION3-3|Section 3.3: The way of the world]
...
...Content...
<h3><a name="SECTION3-3">Section 3.3: The way of the world</a></h3>

To me the header text is obfuscated beyond all recognition. It would be hard to locate while editing and just generally looks ugly (like HTML in general looks).

With my propose @LINK form, the ToC section remains the same (nicely readable) and the header section is changed to:

<h3>[@SECTION3-3|Section 3.3: The way of the world]</h3>

The first benefit I can see is that the contents are parallel in both locations. It's easy to match the patterns. The second benefit I can see is that the second is a whole lot easier to read the title text in, making it simpler to locate when scanning quickly.

anonymous added on 2009-09-25 07:03:43:
Re-opening: When the [#LABEL] form is used, the display of it should not include the opening "#" character. So the example given here should expand to LABEL instead of #LABEL as it currently does.