I know that the approach to have a direct link to the latest spec version was initially rejected because of the danger of breaking links, but I think there are some mitigations that could be employed for that.
Motivation
I tend to open the current spec pretty often when I have to look something up, or to confirm something, or sometimes just to link a specific part of the spec to someone.
For that purpose I have a bookmark to https://spec.commonmark.org/current/.
The pain point that I hit is that the redirect to the actual spec takes relatively long to trigger. Especially if you are used to text-only websites that load basically instantaneously.
Another thing that feels unnecessarily awkward to do, is to link to a specific heading:
My current method to create a link to a section is to:
- Go to the section I’m looking for
- Mark the section heading (with triple click)
ctrl + fthe heading in the table of content- Copy the link
That are entirely too many steps IMO.
Granted most people will likely search for the section directly in the TOC, but I tend to look at the actual text first, to make sure I link to the right thing.
Proposed solution
My suggestion would be to generate section links as github is doing it, with the difference that clicking them should copy the link into the clipboard. That it is copying into the clipboard has to be obvious to the user of cause!
A combination of jumping to the link and pasting it into the users clipboard would of cause also be possible. (For example by having two different UI elements)
These links should be absolute links. Meaning that the link of a section like https://spec.commonmark.org/current/#leaf-blocks should still point to https://spec.commonmark.org/0.31.2/#leaf-blocks.
The reasoning to copy into the clipboard is mostly that clicking on the absolute link would otherwise reload the page when being on /current (to move to the pinned version) and putting the link directly into the clipboard is useful anyway!