Better linking. It'd sure be handy if there were a way to make an arbitrary anchor point on a page, based on a text string, tacked on to the end of a URL. What does that mean? Okay, say you want to link to a certain thing on a page. For example, if you want to link to this post, you can link to
http://www.evhead.com/archives/2001_10_01_arch.asp#6593315
. Or, until it scrolls off the home page, http://www.evhead.com#6593315
. But that's only because I have <a name=6593315>
in my code (inserted automagically, of course). But how often do you want to link to something specific that doesn't have an anchor tag attached (or, maybe it does, but you'd have to dig through the source to find it)? Me? Often. So, why couldn't you just link to http://www.evhead.com#Better Linking
(or, ...#Better%20Linking
, for non-correcting browsers) and, if there wasn't an anchor tag for it, the browser would scroll to the first instance of that string? Wouldn't that be great? Yes, yes, it would. (I expect someone to tell me this has been done, as usually happens when I write about what I think is some brilliantly simple new idea. I hope so.)