does fireball markdown support anchor links?

[Aristotle Pagaltzis]

> the thing about "manually specified" anchors is that they will show
> all kinds of idiosyncrasies. so not only are they work to create, but
> they are also inconsistent, thus undependable, meaning you have to
> look at each one to see what it is, so they have almost _no_ redeeming
> qualities at all.

Yeah, totally agreed.

There are so many advantages to the fact that the anchor is dependably
derived from the text of the heading… well, between all the sites that
use the same Markdown processor configured in the same way… anyway, that
complete consistency is very useful.

It means that if you want to link to the heading, then all you have to
do is copy-paste the text of the heading and then manually edit it into
the format that the Markdown processor uses. You don’t need to look up
the anchor to copy-paste it, which would just be dumb.

It’s also a huge help if you want to know where a link goes – you don’t
even need to click the link (who does that anyway?!), you just scroll
through the document from top to bottom while eyeballing the headers and
hey presto: you know *exactly* where it leads.

Furthermore, in the post-Web 2.0 era URIs are only cool if they could
potentially break before you notice that they are trending. So the fact
that links will break if you edit the text of a heading means derived
anchors are make cool URIs. Really cool URIs sometimes.

So it’s easy to show conclusively that derived anchors are perfect in
every way and the absolute idiosyncrasy of manually specified anchors
results in no redeeming qualities for them at all.