Rule One

Rule

On the Internet, don’t vaguely describe something when you could include a link.

Don’t provide unlinked text saying “on our customer support page”, link the text to your customer support page. Don’t refer vaguely to “the configuration page in our CMS”, link to the configuration page in your CMS.

Things that count as “on the Internet” (for the purposes of this rule; yes, I know): emails, web pages (wiki pages, intranet pages, …), support tickets, tracker stories, task tracker tasks, IM messages, …

Corollary to the rule

On the Internet, make it linkable.

Any web page with content people may wish to link to should be linkable, and any page longer than a few sentences should be deep linkable.

• include id attributes on relevant HTML tags so that people can link to those parts of the page (like https://example.com/article.htm#chapter4).
• make those anchors discoverable (at least on hover) and clickable so that readers can easily use them to link to parts of your pages.

Update

Scroll to text fragment is great, and allows deep linking even when site authors don’t help. (Add #:~:text=text%20fragment%20on%20the%20target%20page to the end of a URL to scroll to the first instance of “text fragment on the target page” on the target page.)

(Geeky details: I use AnchorJS to auto-magically get section links on this site.)