Ever want to link to a specific part of a web page? Well-designed web pages have anchors at the start of each section, which can serve as targets of links.¹ You’ve probably seen URLs that end in #something; that fragment identifier, or “frag-id”, refers to a specific anchor on the page.

What’s annoying, though, is that even if an author includes them, they’re hard to discover. Sometimes there’s a table of contents, sometimes not. What I really wanted was a way to just click on the nearest header and grab the link. So I wrote “Header Anchors”.

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I just discovered the site Little Big Details (via a UI designer’s Twitter feed…only I can’t remember whose).

Yes, yes, a thousand times yes. These sorts of details are what separate functional software from good software. This is the sort of thing I was talking about in “Priorities”. This is something that I think Apple gets right more than most people, but something which is good for everyone.

Whenever there’s a place in your program where you can leave things as they are, or make things easier on the user, and you’re not on a deadline, the right choice is always make things easier on the user.

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