> Seth wrote:

> The best way to handle this is for you, the weblog owner,
> to provide an anchor for everybody else to link to, on each
> article. Of course, you don't want to have to think about it,
> so you can put it in your template. Just add a line like this
> to your item template:

> <a name="<!--#msgNum-->"></a>


Precede it with alpha token <a name="x<!--#msgNum-->"></a>
^
else it won't conform to the HTML style where all-numeric
anchors were recommended against, if not illegal. The reason
for using alphanumeric combos being, if I remember correctly,
to allow editing of the same document by several editors,
where each one's thus (consistently) marked up paragraphs
could be identified. The original 1991 HTML documents of
Tim Berners-Lee himself at telnet://info.cern.ch/ were full
of apparently his usual prefix "z[1-9]*".

On a related note: if one narrows it down, the primary
difference between paper-borne- and web-publishing is the
ability in the latter of an exact, terse, unambiguous
referencing of granules of less than a page. In principle
this is also possible on paper, but only lawmakers use
"section 2 of paragraph 3 of page 4 of such and such legal
code", and it is neither really exact nor unambiguous. It
is therefore a pity that browsers makers haven't felt the
need to incorporate a function to transparently indicate
presence of named anchors in the text.... nor, in general,
the web publishers to mark up documents tn any significant
degree (in fact, Dave Wiener's http://scripting.com/ was
the first to do so, and Frontier and derivates are among
the few content management systems that alleviate the task).

Personally, however, despite the fact that hardly anyone
goes to the trouble of extracting and linking such anchors,
and at no insignificant time cost, I mark up ALL paragraphs
of my projects by default with "pXY"... one never knows when
they will become useful...


__Ian