Ó hAoḋa

¶, §, & 🔗

Introduction§

Anchor links are hyperlinks that link to a different section within the current webpage or document, rather than to an external webpage, thus allowing for links to be shared to specific sections of a webpage and for a table of contents with clickable links to be created for a webpage. Anchor links are probably most commonly found in online technical documentation, but can be seen in many other webpages, including this one: hovering over a heading within this blog post will make a clickable anchor link appear, the value of which can be copied for sharing or other uses. Ordinarily, I would not use any additional sub-headings for a blog post of such short length, but I have shoe-horned some in here just for the sake of demonstration.

However, one may notice that the symbol that I use to represent the anchor links is somewhat unusual: this website uses § to denote anchor links, whereas it’s more common to see ¶ or 🔗 used. In this blog post, I wish to argue for why I think that the § is in fact the best symbol to use for anchor links, why I think that the ¶ is frankly incorrect to use for anchor links despite its popularity, and I’ll also briefly discuss the use of 🔗, although I can’t claim to really have a strong opinion on its usage.

Symbols§

¶§

¶ (referred to as the pilcrow, paragraph mark/sign/symbol, paraph, or blind P) is a glyph traditionally used to identify a paragraph. It is also commonly used to denote anchor links, around equally as often as 🔗 in my experience, although in more formal contexts. For example, the ¶ can be seen being used to represent anchor links in GNU documentation, such as in the GCC Online Documentation. However, I would submit that this is an incorrect usage of the ¶: the purpose of the ¶ is to refer to or denote paragraphs within a body of text, whereas anchor links are typically done on a per-heading basis. If the anchor link were being used to link to a specific paragraph, then I would say that the ¶ is the correct symbol to use, but more often than not the anchor link is linking to a section, and therefore the paragraph mark is inappropriate.

§§

§ (referred to as the silcrow, section mark/sign/symbol, or double-S) is a glyph traditionally used to identify a section. It is most commonly seen in legal contexts being used to refer to a section of law. An example might look something like the following:

under §12 of the Licensing Act of 1872, it is a criminal offence under Irish law to be drunk while in charge of a cow¹.

This is the symbol that is used for anchor links on this website, and it is my opinion that it is far more suitable than the ¶. Anchor links are used for sections, and therefore the section sign should be used, not the paragraph sign. Moreover, if you use the ¶ to reference sections of your webpage, how could one reference a specific paragraph of your webpage? Using the § allows for both sections and paragraphs to be referred to, with an identifiable symbol for each.

I am not aware of any other websites beyond my own that use the § for anchor links, but I’m sure they exist, and hopefully more websites will start to make use of the § in the future, as it’s both more typographically correct and allows for more flexible creation of anchor links, as you can save the ¶ for referencing specific paragraphs if needs be.

🔗§

The 🔗 emoji can be seen increasingly often online to denote anchor links, such as in the GitHub Documentation. While I prefer the more traditional choice of §, the use of 🔗 makes sense for webpages that want to appear modern or semi-formal, and is likely more readily understood by the uninitiated, and is therefore a perfectly fine choice in my opinion. Unlike the ¶, I have no objections to the usage of the 🔗, but I do prefer the § on the whole.