HTML anchor links, documents, contexts

Linking to an anchor in an HTML document is an interesting example of providing a document (or atomic unit of information?) and context. It points you to a specific section or element, but you also still have immediate access to the context that element lives in (you can scroll around the rest of the page).

Units and contexts are something that I end up thinking about a lot (and wish I had some better terminology for), partially because the atomic thing often has some meaning by itself, but that meaning can be vastly transformed by its context (or indeterminable without it)—for example, something along the lines of ColBERT vs. generic word embeddings. A lot of interpreting unstructured information seems to wind up juggling contexts, sub-contexts, atomic units—vacillating between elusive classifications about what should be which.

But anyways, anchors in an HTML document are a fun little microcosm of that. I’ve thought about making per-element (or maybe just per-paragraph?) IDs for everything on my site so you could link to a precise paragraph if you felt like it. I’m curious if there might be any…pseudo-idomatic(?) ways to mess around with that and like, dynamically present an element in the context of a different document or something.

I guess you could also think about things like headers and footers as kinds of repeating, site-wide contexts. But who knows if that’s actually a useful way to think?