Re: HTML self links to anchor points

[Gavin Smith]

On Tue, Nov 03, 2020 at 07:53:08AM -0800, Raymond Toy wrote:
> I tried this out using the maxima manual.  This  looks nice and  works very
> well!  Not sure I like the fact that I can only see the link when I hover
> over the item.  I didn't check on a mobile device, but if this is how it
> works on mobile, that's not so good.  Presumably, I can change this
> behavior with a bit of CSS.

Yes, it is possible to make the links always visible by changing the CSS.

> > I think links for @anchor is important since it's something the author had
> > to say explicitly, so having that available in html seems appropriate.
> > Perhaps I'll change my mind after I see what you've done so far.
> >
> Having seen these new links, I'm not sure what to do about anchors.  In
> maxima's manual, the anchors often point to the first entry of a deffoo.
> So now there would be two links to the same place, with different ids.  In
> this case, it's not terrible.  But if there's an @ref to some @anchor, to
> get the link you'd have to find any @ref pointing the anchor to get the
> link.  That's not so convenient.

For @def* and @*table there is a clear "heading" which the link can
be attached to.  In contrast, @anchors (like index entries) could be
anywhere.  I don't think it would always look good to have a copiable
anchor link (what do you call these things? - "permalink" seems to be
promising too much) and there may not be a good place to put them.
As with index entries, I feel that @anchors should be invisible at
the target (although it would be interesting to see any examples from
documents where having a copiable link for an @anchor would work well).

Texinfo's own manual mainly uses @anchor for renamed nodes so that
old links still work.  Copiable links here would not be useful.