dive into mark

OK I admit it, this had my in stitches. Finally a way of linking directly to the word clutter

— Simon Willison 

They’re so cute, cuddly and GIFfy!
Actually, I wouldn’t mind the hashes so much if they were more like #ccc or even #eee.

— Hans 

And here I thought you were going to announce the birth of your daughter. :) Nice bears, but I think it would be much more appropriate to use a true throwback to 1990’s web kitsch. Maybe a revolving “e” or an animated backhoe?

— Ken Walker 

People complain about purple hashes being visual clutter, but the real problem is that the content is polluted with markup. For example, if I copy Tim Bray’s paragraphs into a text editor, the text is full of meaningless hash marks. Tim should drop the hash marks, before his credibility takes a nosedive!

— James McComb 

I couldn’t agree more. Hash marks, numbers & teddy bears linking to paragraphs (or words) just reeks of ego to me. Is every paragraph sudenly of such importance? No. #

— Seuss 

James: I agree! I used to think Tim Bray had one of the most interesting blogs around, but once he added those hash marks I realised that he was just a two-bit hack. I’ll never trust a word he says again!

On a less sarcastic note, the markup pollution issue is the exact reason I decided to use JavaScript to add the hash marks after the fact. Unfortunately they’ll still end up in the copy-and-paste but at least the underlying source code is clean.

— Simon Willison 

… Mark? Are you alright? …

— Denis Defreyne 

While the purple links seemed to be an interesting idea, overall I don’t think it works and it’s not something that most people would use. However, that little animated gif bear is adorable. *purr*

— nikkiana 

What the heck ever happened to <link rel="bookmark"...> ? Wasn’t that supposed to be the sensible way to provide addressable id‘ed elements on your page?

Nobody really needs addressability all the way down to the paragraph level, but if that’s what you want to do, <link rel="bookmark" href="#p17" title="Paragraph 17"> is a far better way to do it.

— Jacques Distler 

This seems like a solution looking for a problem. Referencing lines in plays by Shakespeare is the only time I’ve seen a body of work referenced by anything more specific then a page number.

— Ramanan 

Haha very good, made me chuckle.

Crazed fool.

— Robin Whyte 

What Jacques Distler say makes sense. Just placing the IDs on paragraphs and not pointing to the directly (Joe Clark does that (and he does that for (almost) every element) might be an option as well.

— Anne 

Mark, note that your teddy bear links, on the homepage, say they are permalinks, but actually are not, since they are not linking to this entry.

So you actually messed it up, a bit.

— Anne 

Mark, you should write “Dive into 14-years-old-girl style website” to help all the girls come out and hurt our eyes in new, creative ways. When you will create a javascript that will translate your page in l33t 5p33|< on-the-fly, so that you don’t have to toil to present yourself as a moron? :D (Yes, I am a lazy bastard, so pl33z, g1v3 m3 a l33t 5p33|< 7R4|\|1E74R)

— Davide Inglima - limaCAT 

Haha, metaphorically literally wet myself.

— Cow 

Classic!
Completely granular references (down to individual characters) *should* be available, and Purple Numbers are just a practical hack to achieve some of that. But the teddy bears show the limitations of this approach. There is a neater, standard way of doing it: XPointer. Finding tools that support it is another matter.

— Danny 

LOL a < ate the rest of my comment. ROFLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOL

— Davide Inglima - limaCAT 

really hilarious. My first thoughts on purple numbers (or plinks) were ambivalent. Now, I’m sure I will never use them.
Next step ? permalink for each character of a text ?

— Bruno Bord 

Brilliant! Everyone should start using these immediately! These will make the web so much more convenient.

— Alden Bates 

Absolutely brilliant. A responsed that sums up most of our thoughts about the ridiculous idea of paragraph permalinks.

— Hanni 

You crack me up. Thanks. :)

— Carlo Zottmann 

Finally, a way to link to each word in turn. No more going through massive articles looking for that special word. Mark, you’ve done it again. Well done!

— wackomenace 

I think we need to get biblical with our content. From now on, everything should be divided into chapters then verses. Thus todays reading is from the book of dive into mark, 1st pink numbers, chapter 1: verse 3-14.
It may not be very in anyway practical, but it’d rank high with usability seeing as most people would recognise it.

(Any reason why we can use strike and not del?)

— Sparticus 

ROFL That was hilarious :)

— Arvind 

Nice strawman! Or is that strawbear? :)

Since you don’t like hashes (who does?) why not use pilcrow signs?

— Michael Day 

XPointer now! XPointer now! XPointer now!

Shoot, you don’t even need XPointer to get to the paragraph level. XPath will do.

— Dorothea Salo 

Mark you are my new hero for sarcastic humor!

— Chris Lancaster 

I invite anyone suggesting XPath/XPointer as a “solution” to try serving their pages as application/xhtml+xml (a requirement for using either of these technologies).

— Jacques Distler 

Pink/purple numbers/hashes is just a bad implementation of an otherwise nice idea. Instead of having always visible hashes/numbers, they should only be visible when the paragraph is hovered over, preferably with the :after pseudo-element to avoid markup clutter.

— Tomas 

Forget having each paragraph, word, or character addressable. Why not have a permalink for the beginning and end of each character? That way, you could have separate, distinct permalinks for “after the last period in the second paragraph” and “before the first letter in the third paragraph”.

Thank you, Mark, for taking the purple number idea to an extreme :-)

— Golden Spud 

purple/pink numbers seem just sick to me.
having those “unobtrusive” purple hashes after every paragraph is… just… ugly. and disturbing.
ok, so you desperately want permalinks to every paragraph? use the first word n the paragraph or an almost-invisible mark, for god’s sake, but please, PLEASE stay away from purple hashes.

— neozen 

Dear Lord. Zing!!!

Very fucking funny. I have been looking for a way to express my displeasure with things like PurpleNumbers/Letters/Etc(doesn’t the use of purple signify sexual frustration or something?) for a goddam while. This pretty much sums it up, and no more needs to be said.

Classic. Comedy has just entered a new golden age.

— The New God 

Mark, suppose I needed to reference the third bit in the fourth byte of the first paragraph. Would that be possible? In Atom? I think it would be very useful, and also in summer, or 25, something so. You can do it in RSS.

— Lars 

“Instead of having always visible hashes/numbers, they should only be visible when the paragraph is hovered over, preferably with the :after pseudo-element to avoid markup clutter.”

Well, first of all–is this something that the UA should be doing or the page author, once each paragraph has IDs? Surrogating browser features via CSS (and especially by changing your *content* like TBray) is really roundabout. Javascript makes more sense (combined with link rel=bookmark)

— Firas