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About Pages Need Linkable Sections

The new "About" pages are a great addition to the site, but the sections of the page are not navigable or linkable. For example, one can't currently link to http://pm.stackexchange.com/about#about-offtopic because the off-topic section contains neither a named anchor nor a CSS id attribute. Instead, the HTML currently contains markup like this:

<div class="about-offtopic">
    <h2 class="about-title">Get answers to practical, detailed questions</h2>

I'd like to see the About pages contain linkable sections so that users can point to relevant sections of the page.

Linkable Sections Would Also Make a Table of Contents Possible

A short table of contents at the beginning for in-page navigation would be nice, too. Having linkable sections would make this possible.

However, while I'd like to see a table of contents added at some point, this is subordinate to the importance of linkable sections. I mention it here for completeness, but please don't let the merits of adding a table of contents sidetrack the core request for linkable About Page sections.

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  • 3
    It is also usefull to use it on comments, instead of using [about], you should be able to use [about#offtopic] – Wouter J Mar 23 '13 at 16:48
  • In case SO is afraid it would clutter the user interface it would be a compromise if the anchor link is only in the source code without a visible gui element to notice it. With the devtools from chrome it is easy to get the name of the fragment identifier and use it to make a deep link to the specific area. – slackmuggle Jun 9 '13 at 8:29
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    @threeFourOneSixOneThree Please don't edit out information crucial to the original post; I didn't understand that CodeGnome had put the actual code into the question, without the code that would've made such anchors work, and thus was wondering why they didn't work until I noticed that you had modified that. – Nightfirecat Jun 9 '13 at 10:18
  • Sorry about that. I assume that you made an edit suggestion to fix my addition; currently i can not fix it myself since another edit is in review. – slackmuggle Jun 9 '13 at 10:19
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Currently the sections of the about page has the following html markup

<div class="about-tags">
    <h2 class="about-title">Tags make it easy to find interesting questions</h2>
    ... 
</div>

If it would be changed to 

<div class="about-tags" name="about-tags" id="about-tags" >
    <h2 class="about-title">Tags make it easy to find interesting questions</h2>
    ... 
</div>

We could link to it by using an anchor-link / fragment-identifier like this https://stackoverflow.com/about#about-tags

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  • I would like to use this in an answer (linking to a specific section there). How can I do that? I tried adding something like <div id="Example1"></div> to create a reference like https://stackoverflow.com/a/13232372/1016343#Example1 but that does not seem to work ... :-( – Matt May 20 at 8:50
  • The share button below the answer provides the link meta.stackexchange.com/a/183694/201728 which should work. – slackmuggle May 20 at 10:16
  • I know that button, but that is not what I asked for. In an answer that does not fit on one page there might me several sections and I want to create an "anchor" so if I cross-reference it from another answer, one can directly jump to the section of that answer. Click on the link above in my comment and scroll down to Example 1, then you will understand what I mean. The link should open the answer at the position of Example 1, which is usually done by appending the "#Id" tag in HTML links. – Matt May 20 at 10:53

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