This facility seems to be built in but not used. When making a post, now, the refreshed page jumps to what you've just written with the url http://typophile.com/node/66589#comment-390973. I've thought that would be handy to use more.

Ben -- That has been the case for some time now. But in order to find a comment number after the fact, you have to View Source. People are requesting easier, more direct access.

Yes, it's not very user-friendly to have to view the source code!

As the unique identifiers are indeed already in existence, it must surely be possible to provide access to it into the UI?

If adding an extra element to every post (like a little permalink icon) would be prohibitive for some reason, one convention that we could adapt from e.g. Wordpress blogs would be to turn the timestamp to the left into a link to the individual entry.

Good suggestion, Nina. That’s logical and wouldn’t cram the page.

Very happy to see this implemented now!!
Thank you guys and bravo – this is a seriously useful improvement.

Awesome. Now get rid of Flash. Please.

It's (near) the top of our list!!

Great going!

But "get rid of Flash" is so Flavor of the Month.
Much more urgent: get rid of dogmatic mobile OSes.

hhp

There are many other reasons to avoid Flash than «certain» platforms not supporting it. It has accessibility issues, it's not as «open»/indexable/… as HTML, it's bloated, it loads slower – and on this site, it doesn't really seem to be necessary for what it does.

Feature request: Get rid of Hrant ;-P

> on this site, it doesn't really seem to be necessary

Build up, not down: there's a feature request -that I've made- which might justify Flash: implement a sophisticated font crit tool. So instead of saying "we don't need electricity because everything we have is made of wood", make stuff that leverages the electricity that's already flowing through the system.

The real reason that Flash bashing is hip now among designers is that most of them have an iOS device and anybody with a gadget he's emotionally attached to (which is pretty pathetic) wants it to do more, wants the hills flattened. But they're preaching in the wrong direction.

Claus, that feature is actually in there, but it's time-triggered. ;-)

hhp

"implement a sophisticated font crit tool"
The «point to something inside an image» thing? Yes that is cool, but I don't even think you need Flash to do that.* (Someone with knowledge of the Canvas element & such, please correct me if I'm wrong.)

HTML has been growing up Hrant. The capabilities of HTML 5 and CSS 3 are much more of a reason to «bash Flash» – it's simply not necessary any more for most of the stuff it's been used for, and HTML is far superior in its lean-ness and its open-ness. Remember how back in the day, many people thought we «need» Java applets? :)

(* All that said: To me using Flash for isolated tasks where it adds functionality that you can't have with HTML –as long as it degrades gracefully for people who can't view Flash– would be open for debate on a case-by-case basis. But that's really something else than having a site's core infrastructure and basic navigation rely on Flash to the extent that it does here.)

Hrant I agree that Flash has it's time and place – but an advanced crit engine is not one of them. You can do all that in HTML, just see the Google Docs as one example. The use of Flash for the top-menu on this site is particularly unwarranted.

> HTML is far superior in its lean-ness and its open-ness.

Not using computers is even more so...
People want to get things done, with the tools available.

Graceful degradation? Wonderful!
Being in the front line of a corporate despot's rabid horde? Not so much.

--

"Get rid of Flash" means get rid of Flash.
If you meant something else, then please say something else.

hhp

We know you like to complain about the iStuff (and I'm not even opposed to your views too much there, to be honest). What I've been trying to point out is there are other, valid, aspects to this issue. They're not as much fun to talk about; but they're still valuable to consider. :-p

> you like to complain about the iStuff

I like to complain about society being mentally enslaved by corporations.
In the 90s I complained about MS.

> there are other, valid, aspects to this issue.

Certainly. One of them being that "graceful degradation"
does not equate to dumbing-down at the behest of a single OS.

hhp

> I like to complain about society being mentally enslaved by corporations.

Now that's something worth complaining about ;)