Markdown has quickly become one of my favorite tools to use as a writer, and so I was happy to see that Steemit supported its use. But as I will outline in the remainder of this post, its current iteration is not without limitations.
This is not a post on how to use Markdown, however, as the community has already created plenty of helpful tutorials on its use. Some of these include posts by @thecryptofiend, @felixxx, and @modeprator.
I wish to discuss a problem I've been having with anchor linking. @luzcypher wrote an excellent post about encouraging internal links on Steemit, which everyone should read, but anchor linking is a separate issue.
Due to the nature of the problem outlined in this post, the table of contents is purely for reference and does not contain anchor links. For that reason, I will also attempt to keep this post short.
While hyperlinks are more commonly known due to their ability to link to external documents, surfing the web couldn't be done without them after all, anchor links create a navigable reference point within the same page of a document. The most relevant example pertaining to this post would be to create a dynamic table of contents. These are particularly helpful to the reader when an article is rather lengthy. Wikipedia, for example, uses them quite a bit.
The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), the international Web standards body, has recommendations for how to use anchor links in HTML, as can be seen here:
| Image: Screenshot W3C Recommendations: Links | Source: W3C | Rights: Fair Use |
And even in Markdown itself, a writer/developer can use them on sites like GitHub or with blog engines like Wordpress or Jekyll.
In my introduceyourself post, I noticed that anchor links that I had embedded to create a functional table of contents in my page were not working.
After multiple tweaks to my code, I realized that feature of the language simply does not work, and when I searched for tips within the Steemit community, my hypothesis appeared more or less to be confirmed.
Hopefully this is not the case and I missed something, but regardless, I decided to write a post to consolidate my findings on the issue.
After publishing my piece to Steemit, I noticed that my anchor links were broken.
Instead of [Back to the top](#toc) taking me to the table of contents, targeted by <a name="toc"></a>, it was sending me to a blank page.
It made no sense since hyperlinking using traditional Markdown syntax, such as the code in this example: [Steemit Homepage](https://steemit.com), worked fine.
Here are links to my revision history for both the draft and the post-publishing versions to see what I mean.
Since the Steemit FAQ also uses anchor links, I decided to look under the hood to see if I could find the code that made it work for that page.
| Image: Steemit FAQ screenshot 1 | Source: Steemit FAQ | Rights: Fair Use |
| Image: Steemit FAQ screenshot 2 | Source: Steemit FAQ | Rights: Fair Use |
When I tried adding that to my code, the link would return DNS errors. Adding the <a class='anchor'> attribute as seen in the code also did not make a difference.
Also, I tried switching the anchor link attribute in my code from <a name=""> to <a id="">, but was unsuccessful in getting that to work.
I'm not the only one to have noticed this issue, either:
@ash wrote a Steemit Bug Report on 08.11.16 on a related matter:
As of the time of this writing, two other anchor related issues remain open on the Github page:
Github #1201: https://github.com/steemit/condenser/issues/1201
Github #205: https://github.com/steemit/condenser/issues/205
I'll write more on this in the future in case anything changes because it's a feature that makes sense and should be supported. Hopefully this is fixed in the coming Condenser update recently mentioned by @steemitblog. This post isn't meant to disparage the developers hard at work on the platform. I am grateful for the work that they are doing, and I am looking forward to the update.
And if I'm wrong about anchor links not being supported by Steemit and I totally missed something, please let me know in the comments below.
Until next time,
Josh
View Steemit blockchain activity/edit history | View draft edit history on Github
Josh Peterson is a 2016 Robert Novak Journalism Program Fellow and a writer living in Denver, CO. Follow Josh on Steemit and Twitter. Keybase for secure chat. PGP Fingerprint: 4507 3000 1A40 2691 DAB8 ED65 A3EA 3629 73FD B7FF
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
