Rui CarmoSo, after all the RSS testing, I finally got around to actually reading my feeds, and found yet another excellent usability snippet. I had come across Tim Bray’s Piece on Purple Numbers earlier, but despite the benefits (it’s great to be able to direct someone to a specific paragraph on a HOWTO), I too found the markup a bit too intrusive.
So I picked up on Simon’s technique and modified PhpWiki to generate unique paragraph IDs inside the content section (I’ve also done it for list items and will probably extend it to headings, but so far I’ve had no time to change Simon’s JavaScript - getting the CSS to work properly with IE is troublesome enough).
Of course these are not true permanent links (editing a page will renumber paragraphs), but since I have no way to add those when editing (and no interest in doing so) and hashing the contents of every p tag to produce a unique ID would be too computationally expensive, this will have to do.
Maybe when I get around to implementing support for Textile markup.