Dear Sphinx developers,
first things first: Thanks a stack for your paramount work on Sphinx. You already saved many souls of people writing technical documentation and probably also beyond this audience.
We just observed a minor woe with Sphinx' linkchecker we wanted to share with you. We really like that the linkchecker is able to check anchors within HTML documents as contributed by @intgr on behalf of #842.
With kind regards,
Andreas.
Describe the bug
We had the link [1] in our documentation, and, maybe after upgrading to more recent versions of Sphinx, the linkchecker suddenly started croaking on that. After changing it to [2], it worked again. When inspecting the source code of the respective HTML page, you can clearly see that the anchor name #user-content-make-changes defined by
<a name="user-content-make-changes"></a>
<a id="user-content-make-changes" class="anchor" aria-hidden="true" href="#make-changes">
is technically correct. However, it apparently has worked before by referencing #make-changes. So, we are wondering if something changed on GitHub's reStructuredText renderer or even Browsers interpreting the HTML link anchors differently. When invoking those links [1,2] in the Browser, actually both work, including navigation to the appropriate place within the page. Funny, hm?
[1] https://github.com/crate/crate-docs-theme/blob/master/DEVELOP.rst#make-changes
[2] https://github.com/crate/crate-docs-theme/blob/master/DEVELOP.rst#user-content-make-changes
Expected behavior
Technically, from the perspective we know our way around HTML, the behavior is probably the right thing and correct.
However, as we can see, something might have been changed on the HTML standard that Browsers are capable of interpreting different styles of defining link anchors. So, it might be worth to revisit this space and maybe improve the linkchecker implementation on those aspects.
Environment info
- OS: Linux
- Python version: 3.9.2
- Sphinx version: 3.5.2
- Firefox: 86.0
Dear Sphinx developers,
first things first: Thanks a stack for your paramount work on Sphinx. You already saved many souls of people writing technical documentation and probably also beyond this audience.
We just observed a minor woe with Sphinx' linkchecker we wanted to share with you. We really like that the linkchecker is able to check anchors within HTML documents as contributed by @intgr on behalf of #842.
With kind regards,
Andreas.
Describe the bug
We had the link [1] in our documentation, and, maybe after upgrading to more recent versions of Sphinx, the linkchecker suddenly started croaking on that. After changing it to [2], it worked again. When inspecting the source code of the respective HTML page, you can clearly see that the anchor name
#user-content-make-changesdefined byis technically correct. However, it apparently has worked before by referencing
#make-changes. So, we are wondering if something changed on GitHub's reStructuredText renderer or even Browsers interpreting the HTML link anchors differently. When invoking those links [1,2] in the Browser, actually both work, including navigation to the appropriate place within the page. Funny, hm?[1] https://github.com/crate/crate-docs-theme/blob/master/DEVELOP.rst#make-changes
[2] https://github.com/crate/crate-docs-theme/blob/master/DEVELOP.rst#user-content-make-changes
Expected behavior
Technically, from the perspective we know our way around HTML, the behavior is probably the right thing and correct.
However, as we can see, something might have been changed on the HTML standard that Browsers are capable of interpreting different styles of defining link anchors. So, it might be worth to revisit this space and maybe improve the linkchecker implementation on those aspects.
Environment info