The Pleasing Purple Pilcrow Permalink

‘Purple numbers’ are identifiers used for addressing documents at a paragraph level that can be used for granular linking. Essentially, they are a short term solution to a linking problem that could be fixed cleanly with a smarter browser.

Hooked by the purple but put off by the numbers, Tim Bray started using purple hash symbols instead, which prompted Jonas Luster and Simon Willison to do likewise. Simon had the bright idea of hiding the hash symbols by default and only showing the one at the end of the currently hovered paragraph.

Although hiding the hashes in this way is a great improvement, it could be argued that even one hash symbol on-screen at a time is too great a price to pay, as they are truly hideous and ugly things.

Hash symbols are chunky and awkward, with sharp corners. They take up a big square space and leave unsightly blotches at the end of what would otherwise be finely crafted paragraphs. In many fonts they are italic, pointing in obscure directions and marring any attempt at rounding out a rhetorical point or smoothly moving to the next paragraph. In short, they stink.

Here is an example of the hash symbol — a coarse and vulgar character, spawned from the telephone keypad, its only claim to fame being its visual association with the URL fragment identifier, which is not much to be proud of — being used as a paragraph permalink:

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit. Donec augue lorem, venenatis ut, aliquam non, varius sit amet, erat. Donec nunc lorem. #

This monstrous octalthorpe can be replaced with an elegant symbol that actually belongs at the end of a line: the PILCROW SIGN:

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit. Donec augue lorem, venenatis ut, aliquam non, varius sit amet, erat. Donec nunc lorem. ¶

This immortal classic of typography is available as character entity #xB6 hex or #182 decimal. Try it in your font of choice and see how it looks.

Update:

The Pleasing Purple Pilcrow has claimed two victims! Both Jonas and Tim have fallen beneath its sway — Tim getting the idea from Simon Phipps.