Anchorage

I secure my leisure by laboring all the livelong day as a programmer. Developers whose work, like mine, is "web-centric" (and whose isn't these days?) will inevitably work with html from time to time, no matter how  low-level  or computationally august their main duties are.

One of the terminological anomalies of html is the "anchor" - a.k.a. the "(hyper)link." Engineers, at least, still refer to them as anchors, since that's the name of the html tag which creates them - e.g., <a href="http://paulcraddick.typepad.com/fragmenta_philosophica/"> (Yep, the "a" standards for "anchor"). Since good programming practice dictates that programmatic constructs be named in a way which points to their function in an obvious manner, it's easy to see why "anchor," well, rankles.

In the wonderful O'reilly edition on HTML/XHTML, for example, the authors write,

"The nomenclature here is a bit unfortunate: the 'anchor' tag should mark just a destination, not the jumping-off point of a hyperlink, too. You 'drop anchor'; you don't jump off one. We won't even mention the atrociously confusing terminology the W3C [Ed. eminent, ahem, standards body] uses for the various parts of a hyperlink, except to say that someone got things all 'bass ackwards'."

An obscure parallel occurs to me: I have a very interesting series of musical instruction books which endeavor to show that, contrary to the apparently arbitrary tuning of the standard modern guitar (from low string to high: E-A-D-G-B-E), there actually is a hidden rationale for what seems  senseless, superficially. The same might be the case with the naming of the html anchor.

There is a kind of (nautical) anchor called a "kedge," which is used for warping. The idea is that the kedge - a light anchor - is tossed ahead; being secured, it may then be employed to pull the vessel forward. Adapting this somewhat arcane usage to the web context, one would understand the html anchor as a way to pull the browser to the distant ("anchored") destination. Of course, this is all figurative talk anyhow - one doesn't really "go" anywhere on the web, but rather brings resources to oneself. But at least the html anchor is sort of nominally "redeemed" thereby.  And, since I've never seen anyone else make the connection to a kedge - though surely someone somewhere has - I thought I'd ... throw it out there.