Meta: Links that take you where you already are

[not-my-profile]

The HTML parsing page contains several links that take you directly to where you already are. E.g. clicking on the "in body" hyperlink just takes you to the heading immediately before it.

I consider these links to be redundant and rather confusing. They also rather unnecessarily show up in the backreferences of the <dfn> element generated by html-dfn.js.

[domenic]

I think it's better to consistently link all insertion modes, even if you're already in them.

[not-my-profile]

A hyperlink has one of two purposes:

• to take you somewhere else, or to
• make the current location sharable.

The former clearly doesn't apply since it doesn't take you anywhere else and the latter also isn't necessary since there already are the § links before the headings. The links thus do not have any purpose and should be removed. This is also a matter of accessibility ... useless links certainly only negatively impact it.

[tabatkins]

In the context of a spec, a hyperlink also helps to indicate that the word/phrase is a technical term of art, rather than a plain English term.

[not-my-profile]

For the terms in questions that would better be accomplished with dfn elements.

[annevk]

The heading uses that. The references to it use <a>.

[not-my-profile]

Right ... so why don't we move the dfn annotations from the heading to the first mention of the term in the paragraph after it? Resolving both this issue as well as whatwg/whatwg.org#425?

[annevk]

I think that would be okay (though @domenic might disagree based on his response there), but it would be quite the refactor ID-wise as now the heading and <dfn> need separate IDs.

[not-my-profile]

Oh ... that's a good point I haven't considered. Ok yeah I think we we want to keep the dfn elements in the headers in this case. I still think this emphasis would be better done with an em tag rather than using links that take you nowhere.