[kbs666]

You are confusing things that are unrelated.

Yes, there is a rendering engine that handles displaying the UI, it's called Windows. There is an additional render engine that displays the user data. You seem to be under the impression it is simply creating something along the lines of a single webpage. That is incorrect. Every control is rendered separately. A snippet is a control in case there is any confusion.

Creating links in the program is simple at this point. They simply open topics. Maintaining the table of valid linker names trivial, it is simply every existing topic and article( plus aliases ). What you want is the equivalent of the anchor + bookmark functionality of HTML links which would require LWD to add that functionality, which since there is no DOM is not nearly as simple as you think.

As to your idea of placeholder topics to serve as links to real topics elsewhere in the hierarchy. This shows you truly do not understand the issue. In a DB this would be incredibly wasteful. A record, in the same table, is always the same size. So absolutely nothing would be gained by having a pseudo topic pointing to the "real" through a special snippet. What you seem to really be asking for is the ability to put the same topic in multiple places in the hierarchy which as I explained before is called many to many relationships and is problematic for a number of technical reasons. You can achieve roughly the result you desire by using a single container and establishing a relationship to any other topics as needed.