As part of my ongoing efforts to streamline this site, I recently added the ability to link to specific comments. I detailed this process in an “earlier post”:http://www.magpiebrain.com/archives/000222.html (which lets hope gets automatically linked to using RelatedEntries), whereupon “Cheah(Redemption In a Blog)”:http://blog.codefront.net/ “pointed out(Comment on Comment Permalinks with MovableType)”:http://www.magpiebrain.com/archives/000222.html#comment422 that my use of anchors (via the “name (Links in HTML Documents – name attribute)”:http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/struct/links.html#adef-name-A attribute) was not as meaningful as linking to a semantic construct. I did some reading around the subject, notably Tantek’s “Anorexic Anchors”:http://www.tantek.com/log/2002/11.html#L20021128t1352, and the W3C’s “specification”:http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/struct/links.html#anchors-with-id.

I was using a standard @@ tag to create an anchor within a page – for example on a page @post.html@, a @@ tag allows the page to be loaded and to have the page automatically scroll to the location of the link when the link to @post.html#comment@ is clicked on. Allowing specific areas of a page to be directly linked to can be very powerful – I have used this in other areas, for example I have dropped the use of the MT standard comment listing template in favour of a single page containing the post itself and the comments, with an anchor linking to the comment region. The thrust of Cheah’s comment and Tantek’s post was that using an @