No anchor link icon besides section title

Anchor link icon is no longer present besides section titles; I asked about this on Bugzilla (1501742), they were removed during the redesign, so is there any specific reason to remove anchor link from title? Because anchor link icon was very helpful, when we’re sharing links with others, now I’ve to manually append section title in the URL (like url#Section-title) then share it, which is very annoying. It would be really nice, if anchor link icon is present once again besides section titles.

@finn I was also unhappy about their removal and asked about this; the answer I got was that adding them had a significant impact on page performance, so they were removed from the read-only version of MDN (they are still available in the editable/wiki version).

You can still get links to specific sections using the page navigation menu that is available in the left-hand sidebar on many pages, but these only tend to show H2s, iirc, and they are turned off on some pages.

I am going to file this in my “MDN dev papercuts” list, and talk to the dev team about finding a different way to implement this that doesn’t affect performance so much. I agree with you that this feature is useful.

1 Like

@chrisdavidmills,

significant impact on page performance

Can you explain this part i.e. how does it affect performance? As far as I know, generating a href isn’t a difficult task.

left-hand sidebar on many pages

Thanks.

I don’t have any more specific information than this, I’m afraid. @Schalk_Neethling, did I get this information correct? Do you have any more specifics?

That doesn’t feel like it makes any sense. They were there for ages simply weren’t implemented on the new site. If adding them would introduce a performance issue, that seems like it indicates a significant design issue to me. :slight_smile:

So, the way this used to be implemented was via JavaScript adding some DOM elements to relevant headings as well as the inlined SVG icon. When we were doing performance analysis to determine what was causing a performance difference between the old and new(we were on par and then saw a drop in performance), one of the items that was identified as having an impact on TTI was the icons.

This was not the main culprit for sure, but was identified as one contributing factor. We did some thinking and simplified the JS(i.e. we no longer injected the SVG but added it as a background image), but then Peter improved on that by adding what the JS was adding via Python.

At this stage unfortunately it was felt that we were spending way to much time on this feature which, according to our analytics data, was used very infrequently. As such, a product decision was made to remove the feature entirely and revisit it at a later stage.

We all love the feature and do miss it though. Perhaps now is a time to revisit it? With that said, perhaps we should just have it make a comeback with the rewrite/implementation of Yari aka Stumptown.