Github Markdown anchor only linking to top of the page

Question

I'm not sure if this place would be appropriate to ask about Github wiki markdown issues. I'll remove it if it is so.

So, I am writing up a wiki page for a repository, and I've been trying to add anchors. However, the anchor only seems to lead to reload the page, or lead to the top of the page. I'm pretty sure my syntax is correct, but I don't know what's wrong.

I have example as:

Link as: <a name="#dinpanel"></a>

Then I access it with: [text to show](myrepositoryweburl#dinpanel) Also if I just type "myrepositoryweburl#dinpanel" to the URL, it still loads to top of the page. I'm wondering what is going on with Markdown. Any help would be appreciated!

Answer 1

Use a Markdown header rather than a raw HTML anchor.

As documented in github/markup , after the Markdown is converted to HTML...

The HTML is sanitized, aggressively removing things that could harm you and your kin—such as script tags, inline-styles, and class or id attributes.

While name attributes are not specifically mentioned, id attributes are and they serve a similar function. A previous version of the document linked to the sanitation script , which does not include the name attribute in the whitelist of approved attributes. In other words, GitHub's sanitizer is removing your name attribute.

In fact, if you use your browser's view source feature, I expect you will find that the name attribute is missing from the HTML on that page. However, all is not lost. If you notice, step 4 includes (emphasis added):

The HTML is passed through other filters in the html-pipeline that add special sauce, such as emoji, task lists, named anchors , CDN caching for images, and autolinking.

In other words, every header ( h1 , h2 ,... h6 ) in the document is assigned a unique id . Therefore, you can point to the id assigned to any header, and you will get the behavior you desire.

# Din Panel

...

[link](#din-panel)

Note that to generate an id , all characters are converted to lowercase ASCII characters, all punctuation (expect hyphens and spaces) is removed, and all spaces are replaced with hyphens ( - ). Finally, if needed, an incrementing number is appended to the end to ensure each id is unique.

If you are having trouble correctly guessing the auto-generated id , you can always view the generated page on GitHub, and when hovering over the header, an anchor icon will appear next to the text. That icon will contain a link to that specific header with the correct id . Or you could use your browser's view source feature (or the inspect developer tool) to determine the id assigned to the header.

Answer 2

GitHub wiki strips all of the "id=" tags that you might embed in HTML. That means that your intra-page links will not work, unless you link to an id that is generated automatically by GitHub wiki.

For example, to do foot-notes in a GitHub wiki:

First, use a heading for each part of your wiki page. That heading will automatically generate an id, and you can see the link by previewing the page and hovering your mouse cursor slightly to the left of a heading. The conversion is predictable: " A Heading Like This " becomes the relative URL " #a-heading-like-this ".

From within your wiki document, link to a footnote with inline HTML that looks like this, with each footnote having its own number, starting with 1:

<sup><a href="#93">[93]</a></sup>

At the end of your wiki page, arrange the footnotes like this, with each one pointing back to the header within which the footnote link is found:

***

###### [1]
Here is the text of footnote number 1 [↩](#a-heading-like-this)

###### [2]
Here is the text of footnote number 2 [↩](#a-heading-like-this)

Answer 3

I use markdown as follows for anchors within a page.

Link as:

<a id="idtext"></a>  

Then I access it with:

[text to show](#idtext)