Highlighting Named Anchors with jQuery

Posted by Peter Baumgartner on April 17, 2009. Filed under code

I’ve always disliked the way named anchors (<a href="#name">...</a>) behave in browsers. It jumps your viewport to a different part of the page, but it’s rarely obvious which section you have landed on. If the page is long enough, the referenced section will start at the top of your browser, but where does it end? If the content is towards the bottom of the page, it may not be at the top of the page, but somewhere in the middle. And what if your content is in two columns? Or a table? What you’ve linked to becomes totally ambiguous.

Sphinx uses named anchors quite a bit, so I wanted something that would improve their usability for Django Best Practices. That’s when I dug up this clever little jQuery snippet from our code vault.

// highlight and fade background on named anchors
// requires jquery.color.js ...

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Django Best Practices

Posted by Peter Baumgartner on April 9, 2009. Filed under django

This post got a bit long-winded, skip to the project announcment if you prefer.

One of the things I love about Python and Django is the philosophy that there is one obvious way to do things. Standards make it easy to dive into other people’s code and figure out what is going on pretty quickly. As with anything under active development, however, those standards are subject to change over time. What was best practice for building sites with Django 0.91 is significantly different than building sites with Django 1.0. Better tools and more experience allow us to refine our processes over time into a set of best practices. While both Python and Django are very well documented, much of the experience and wisdom that is outside the scope of the official documentation is not.

Blogs are Bad for Documentation

Most of this information lives scattered across blogs ...

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