Friday, January 8, 2016

Apple Mail Ignores Named Anchors

Adam C. Engst:

I now have direct confirmation that Apple is aware that the versions of Mail in both OS X 10.11 El Capitan and iOS 9 do not properly honor navigating to standard HTML named anchor tags.

[…]

Frankly, I find this bug extremely distressing, not because it’s all that significant — you can always just scroll down in the TidBITS issue — but because named anchors were described in the 1992 CERN document (presumably by Tim Berners-Lee) that was the very first public documentation of HTML. It boggles the mind that Apple’s engineers could bungle such a simple behavior that sits at the very core of HTML, and fail to fix it in the two minor updates to El Capitan and iOS 9 released so far.

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On the one hand, I don't think I've ever needed to jump to an anchor in an email (though I can see how it would be very helpful in an emailed TidBITS issue, for sure), but on the other hand it's not terribly surprising in some ways, since Safari itself couldn't handle named anchors for years (I don't remember when it was fixed, but it does seem fixed in Safari 5, the oldest I have readily available).

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