Marking links and anchors

grayen

I am just starting out with my Zettelkasten, so I might be asking something that has already been covered but I haven't stumbled upon yet. I was wondering what the reasoning is to not mark links. This might very well be specific to The Archive or similar software, but to give an example of what I mean. I generally see something like this:

This is some sentence about the relevance of the link to Zettel [[202004161844]].

In other words, the style you generally see used for footnotes, like [1]. However with URLs you generally see the relevant text marked, like [something](https://example.com). Am I right in my assumption that this is because Zettels should be structured such that the whole "block" (i.e. paragraph, list item, heading) should be about the linked Zettel, and so there is no need to mark a piece of it? Or is it because I should see them like footnotes, i.e. as a internal link / anchor to another piece of the whole (i.e. the Zettelkasten).

I started thinking about linking and how I could point to specific parts within my Zettels, but after thinking some more about it, I realized that this might be a completely wrong way to think of it, namely that the moment you feel like you want to have internal links or point to something specific within your Zettel that it just means the Zettel should have been split up in multiple Zettels. Am I correct to think that? Or is the some other guideline to this?

BTW with anchor I mean for example the #something ending of URLs that allow you to go to a specific element within a HTML document.

ctietze

@grayen said:
I generally see something like this:

This is some sentence about the relevance of the link to Zettel [[202004161844]].

In other words, the style you generally see used for footnotes, like [1]. However with URLs you generally see the relevant text marked, like [something](https://example.com).

This is for historical reasons. Wiki links tend to work with double square brackets. But this isn't followed through to the end: you cannot customize the linked text, e.g. See [[202004162033|my note on fish]] for details. We stick to [[...]] to make quickly linking stuff easy, and have click-able connections, but nothing more. If you want to use these intra-Zettelkasten-links when you convert documents from e.g. Markdown to PDF, then you have to fall back to something like [my note on fish][[202004162035]], but that's not considered valid Markdown in e.g. the CommonMark specs. (Example)

You seem to have a good grasp on how we use it in practice. I still think my ~2010 approach of using § to denote intra-Zettelkasten-links, e.g. See [my note on fish][§202004162039], is technically superior (it is valid Markdown, and the link can be resolved in previews if you append [§202004162039]: ... etc. via scripts), but useless in practice So we resort to treat notes a bit differently, as a preliminary step towards writing, and during the compilation step, you make proper Markdown out of everythin.

@grayen said:
I started thinking about linking and how I could point to specific parts within my Zettels, but after thinking some more about it, I realized that this might be a completely wrong way to think of it, namely that the moment you feel like you want to have internal links or point to something specific within your Zettel that it just means the Zettel should have been split up in multiple Zettels. Am I correct to think that? Or is the some other guideline to this?

I think that's a very good hunch! Apart from long lists of things, I listen to similar wants, and then split the note up.