[whatwg] Making it possible to do an anchor link to any DOM node

Hi,

Currently when linking to specific places in a document one is limited  
to the places the original author made linkable via an anchor <a> tag.  
While this is a nice touch (though not well exposed by modern  
browsers), the reality is that most of the time the person who writes  
a document that links to the original page has a better idea of where  
exactly he wants to link to.

So I think it should be possible to "dynamically" get an implicit  
anchor on essentially anything. This would be specific DOM id's or any  
css selector or xpath expression. Browsers could be extended to not  
only feature a "copy link" context menu, but also "copy link to  
element", which would do all the nitty gritty work of pointing to the  
element on which the context menu was invoked.

I searched this list to determine if something like this was suggested  
before, the only relevant post [1] I found does not seem to actually  
discuss the same at closer inspection. I just joined this list and I  
have not done a super indepth study on the web about this. So I hope I  
am not boring you all with an old idea.

regards,
Lukas Kahwe Smith
smith at pooteeweet.org

[1] http://lists.whatwg.org/htdig.cgi/whatwg-whatwg.org/2007-April/010801.html

Received on Wednesday, 18 June 2008 13:03:20 UTC