Creating an anchor in Markdown

Is it a native Markdown "tag" for creating an anchor? Unfortunately, I haven't any information about it at Markdown syntax page.

Of course, I know that I can use HTML tag to do it, for example <a name="foo" />, but I don't want to mix Markdown and HTML code if it's not necessary.

BTW, ikiwiki doesn't displays the #foo anchor in the example ("To link to an anchor inside a page...") at WikiLink page...

--?Paweł

No such syntax exists in markdown. ikiwiki could certainly have a preprocessor directive for it, though. --?JoshTriplett

I'd like to implement such a thing. Joey, what is this supposed to look like? [[anchor WHATEVER]]? --?tschwinge

Why would you want to use a preprocessor directive for something that can be more shortly and clearly done with plain HTML? Markdown is designed to be intermixed with HTML. --?Joey

I tend to disagree. It just doesn't feel right for me to put HTML code straight into Markdown files.

Quoting http://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/:

The idea is that a Markdown-formatted document should be publishable as-is, as plain text, without looking like it’s been marked up with tags or formatting instructions.

Also, in theorie at least, Markdown might also support other output formats than HTML. Those wouldn't know about how to deal with the intermingled HTML code.

--?tschwinge

Not sure [[anchor WHATEVER]] looks any better than <a name="WHATEVER">...? --?sabr

The lack of the #foo anchor in the anchor example on wikilink definitely looks like a bug. --?JoshTriplett

Fixed that --?Joey


Considering a hierarchy like foo/bar/bar, I had the need to link from the foo/bar/bar page to the foo/bar one. It would have been convenient to simply write wikilinks like [[../bar]] (or even just [[..]]?), but this doesn't work, so I had to resort to using [[foo/bar]] instead. --?tschwinge

I believe, that doesn't entirely solve the problem. Just assume, your hierarchy is /foo/bar/foo/bar.

How do you access from the page /foo/bar/foo/bar the /foo/bar and not /foo/bar/foo/bar?

Do we have a way to implement [[../..]] or [[/foo/bar]]?

Even worse, trying to link from /foo/bar to /foo/bar/foo/bar ... this will probably need [[./foo/bar]] --?Jan

There is no ".." syntax in wikilinks, but if the link begins with "/" it is rooted at the top of the wiki, as documented in linkingrules. Therefore, every example page name you listed above will work unchanged as a wikilink to that page! --?Joey


How do I make images clickable? The obvious guess, [[foo.png|/index]], doesn't work. --?sabr

You can do it using the img plugin. The syntax you suggested would be ambiguous, as there's no way to tell if the text is meant to be an image or displayed as-is. --?Joey


Is it possible to refer to a page, say [[foobar]], such that the link text is taken from foobar's title meta tag? --Peter

Not yet. :-) Any suggestion for a syntax for it? Maybe something like [[|foobar]] ? --?Joey

I like your suggestion because it's short and conscise. However, it would be nice to be able to refer to more or less arbitrary meta tags in links, not just "title". To do that, the link needs two parameters: the page name and the tag name, i.e. [[pagename!metatag]]. Any sufficiently weird separater can be used instead of '!', of course. I like [[pagename->metatag]], too, because it reminds me of accessing a data member of a structure (which is what referencing a meta tag is, really). --Peter