When everyone from Lauren to Aaron Swartz is whining at me to make the #-marks go away, I have to listen. I’ve adapted Simon Willison’s brilliant hack, and a couple of remarks are worth making.
First of all, I modified the approach by replacing # with ¶ per the suggestion of another Simon. Whereas # suggests Web anchors, it only suggests that to Web hacks, while ¶ has a long typographical history as a paragraph marker. Plus, it’s kind of pretty and it’s officially called a Pilcrow, which you gotta love. Now that the anchor is so evanescent, I wonder if it might work in a shade slightly less ethereally pale.
Also, as several others have noted, it’s not obvious that you need an anchor on every paragraph. So I do that by hand here upstream, Emacs makes it effortless so that means a lot of little judgment calls as to whether any particular paragraph is potentially worthy of an anchor. Which would be completely impossible, so for now, I’m just wiring ’em in on every paragraph in any fragment that has more than two or three.
The Real Lesson · Follow the bouncing ball: Chris Dent pipes up about the Atom ID debate and his purple numbers echo off recent words by Jonas Luster, so I say “why not?” and go there, discarding the numbers, Willison makes it unobtrusive, Phipps improves the typography, and then there’s the adorable bear (It’s a good thing that nobody came into the room while Lauren and I were sitting on the couch laughing uncontrollably at all those teddies). I consider a fantastically elaborated prank to anchor every character in a short posting, subtly-elegant float-overs writhing in my mind, but decide that enough is enough. And I think to myself, what a wonderful world.....
