Link Within Article
 

This may be a bit lofty but I'm throwing it out there anyway.

Here's the scenario. I have a long article about a race and it includes a list of ten traits with descriptions and a table. I also have a spell article that requires the caster to have a specific trait of said race and another article that references the table. The articles can have links to the class article but it's a long article and the traits and table are toward the bottom so the user has to scroll all the way down to the specific trait or table.

In HTML you can create one or more anchor points on Page A. A link to the anchor is then created within Page A and in Page B. The user clicks on the link and Page A is opened right where the anchor is located.

I think that not only would this be helpful for Worlds and Adventures but also in Mechanics References as companies enter their rule books for users to buy on the Market. It would be a feature used a lot.

Think this was mentioned somewhere else, but...

Still a definite +1!

Of course it was since it was the one time I didn't bother to search before posting. Busted :rolleyes:

It was here. There are other link ideas there too.

Thanks. Your second idea is exactly what I would like to have.

A lot of time the way to handle this is to break out the stuff that needs to be linked to, like the race specific trait, into its own topic or article. Pretty much anything that is or can be referenced by a unique name that you want to link to should simply get its own topic or article.

That is just it. I don't want to reference it by a specific name. I want to be able to link to a section of a topic. You shouldn't have to atomize to link to it. I want to be able on some topics or at category level to involve a target dialog when I enter the topic name elsewhere. Thus if I am working on an entry that discusses organizations of my world and I enter the name of a realm, I want to be able to link to the 'organizations' section of that realm's topics without having to create a sub topic of the realm.
Are there workarounds to do that now? Yes but this software is about not forcing you into too many molds.
Is this a deal-breaker? Certainly not. It is a perfectly valid request.

How would you go about creating these links? The HTML format wouldn't work in RW.

You're asking for a pretty drastic overhaul of the linker for a feature that can be achieved in other ways which most people would never use and would never understand.

Well, I cannot be sure how LWD implemented things, but it is highly likely that a 'topic' is a table with subtables that are the sections and further subtables that are snippets. So, to link to a section or even a snippet is actually fairly trivial and will require almost nothing if that is the case. The UI, of course, is always the challenge....

But even that need not be that hard. You add a database table for each topic that contains any defined targets (these are inherited by default from the category, if provided). When the engine encounters a topic reference in its scan to generate links, rather than linking straight-away, it checks to see if a target table exists. If so, it presents the user a dialog letting him link to either the topic at-large or any of the defined targets.

Not really that hard. And it is completely unintrusive if the user never defines topic targets. The system works identical to how it does now with no further complexity.

Right now, links are likely stored as a table reference to a topic table. This would mean that links would refer to topic sub-tables. I am assuming the system LWD is using is like most SQL database engines that support referential databases. If not, well, who knows how hard it would be?

How do you know it's a "pretty drastic overhaul"? I don't see "Lone Wolf Staff" below your name. And how do you know that "most people would never use and would never understand" how to use internal links? Isn't that a bit presumptuous assuming that most users aren't smart enough to understand it let alone use it? Yes, there are other ways of doing it but it creates a lot of articles to clutter things not to mention the extra work creating the articles. And maybe the client doesn't want each section a separate article, as is my case, because the client feels the user would want all the information of that subject in one article instead of linking to half a dozen articles. All things have pros and cons to them but instead of assuming and shooting something down because you wouldn't do it that way why not offer a suggestion of how you would work around it and leave it at that.