plinks

Simon Willison has written a summary of his implementation of something called "plinks" or "paragraph permalinks", the idea of which being the addition of a visible anchor to each paragraph in a web page to make it addressable. Simon's main concerns were that the visible portion of the link not visually clutter the page, that the links retain permanency (not change over time), and that they not require additional mark-up during the process of page creation (something that could be at odds with the permanency requirement).

It is an interesting idea - one that I think I could see myself wanting to implement on some pages. Simon's approach of building a small javascript library that can be referenced by any page where the plink framework needs to be implemented is effective and elegant. Worthwhile reading.

Posted by Tom on June 08, 2004