See <link1>. All of what [PeterSealy] said, and especially

or do you mean yadda yadda <link> yadda?
absterge, Apr 24 2001

and annotation by [iuvare]
and objections of [AfroAssault]

I propose that:
1. Each added link be assigned a serial number # (one or two decimal digits) at the time of creation. Deleting a link will not change the number assigned to other links.

2. <help file>In an account description, an annotation, and the main text of an idea, the sequence < br > will produce a single line break (as in HTML), and an empty line will produce a paragraph break. The sequence <link#> will be turned into the url in the #th link.</hf>
-- neelandan, Nov 06 2001

1. Inline link Idea http://www.halfbake...idea/Inline_20Links
This is the idea on which mine is based. [neelandan, Nov 06 2001, last modified Oct 05 2004]

It is annoying if you post an anno and an accompanying link, and there's no way to link the two other than by quoting the name, and even then your reader has to hunt thru a list. Numbering links would be a simple solution, even without hypertext functionality. Although deleting links would make it look a bit raggedy, it's not a desperate problem. Connecting links to annos would be handy also, as the only current way is by yr name and date, so you can see why a particular link has been included.
-- pottedstu, Nov 06 2001


Rods, I may be missing something obvious, but it doesn't look like XLink is related to this suggestion. neelandan wants numbered, clickable links; XLink looks like a version of the <a> tag that's been designed by Vernon.

You could solve the nonconsecutive numbers problem by internally giving each link an arbitrary code (like annotations have now) and translating <<link:1>> to that code when posting the annotation, and then back again when displaying the idea.
-- cp, Nov 06 2001


Numbered annos and links would make it a lot easier to refer to a specific annotation/link, to say which point you're responding to, to refer to annos on different pages, etc. I considered if you'd want the numbers to update automatically if notes were deleted, but that would make cross-referencing more complex, so I would say not.

I wouldn't want to spoil the elegantly spartan look of B/2, but this change shouldn't take much work, should it? The CGI program must have some internal unique numbering system for annos and links.
-- pottedstu, Nov 06 2001


I don't understand why you need a formalism here. You already have the ability to label the links, and then refer to the labels. If you want to have a link [1], you can just name it that. I recommend you use words, not numbers; words are easier to remember.

Having the live links actually in the text would be a minor convenience, but I still think that keeping them separate produces a more focused discussion, in that it forces people to make sure that their links can stand on their own, even without much context. In a hard-to-read medium of short paragraphs, not requiring much context is a virtue.

Since the idea has nothing to do with dating the links, I don't think we should discuss it for the third time.
-- jutta, Nov 06 2001


I think numbering the annotations makes more sense than numbering the links, since *they* don't have titles. I don't think it's crucial though, since generally it's pretty clear what anno you mean when you just say "[PeterSealy]:". We just want to make 1/2B the bestest possible place in the world.

Incidentally, what do the weird numbers you sometimes see as targets at the end of idea page URLs mean? Do they identify anything? (example: http://www.halfbakery.com/ idea/Fog_20Horns_20With_20Soul# 1005080602-12-1; spaces inserted for presentation reasons.)
-- pottedstu, Nov 06 2001


And I've sworn off explaining to you every little part of how I run my website, Peter, just to correct the half-true explanations I wish you'd stop giving on my behalf.

The number (or sometimes link name) is indeed an anchor, but its purpose is not to jump you directly to the named item, but to make the link to the idea look "new" to some browsers (such as the version of Netscape I'm using); it has other or no effects in some other browsers. It gets updated for both links and annotations.

This is all part of "fiddling with the interface" and may change soon to be similar, but slightly different. Don't rely on it.
-- jutta, Nov 06 2001


I'd wondered why it didn't seem to scroll to somewhere sensible despite the anchor.

If you wanted to make it work on IE, I suppose you could stick a '?blah=1234-567-89' on the end of the URL which is ignored by the CGI script.
-- cp, Nov 07 2001


These details all have little side effects. If I stick ?... on the end of a URL, it leads to search engines downloading the same page over and over again with different pointers to it; I don't want that to happen.
-- jutta, Nov 07 2001



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