== A small annoyance with HTML

One of the things I don't like about HTML is its peculiar restrictions
on [[anchors http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/struct/links.html]] (<a>
elements), specifically named anchors. Named anchors are what you use to
specify the target of '#fragment' URL fragments, and the restrictions
matter because they constrain where you can point such fragment URLs.

There are two annoying restrictions: anchors cannot be nested, and
anchors must include something inside them; they cannot be empty. That
anchors cannot nest constrains your ability to make a fragment target
wrap arbitrary content, for example a sentence, since the sentence might
contain links.

(If you want to wrap an anchor around just a link, you can merge the two
by putting the 'name=...' on the link <a>. But this doesn't work if the
link is only part of the text you want to anchor to.)

That anchors must contain something clashes with the fact that often
anchors are logically attached to positions, not things. Attaching
them to a thing related to the position works, sort of, but it is an
annoying hack. I do not want to anchor to the first word or letter of
a paragraph; I want to anchor to the start of the paragraph itself.

(Technically you can make arbitrary elements into named anchors by
giving them a suitable _id_ attribute, except that this may have other
side effects. And it only works at the start of elements.)

I will freely admit that both of these are more of a problem for systems
that automatically generate HTML (like [[mine DWiki]]) than for people
who are authoring it by hand.