bookmark

In more detail

Each line names a part of the document and leads straight to it. They nest as the document does — a chapter holding its sections, a section holding what is under it — and the reader opens and closes them as suits them.

They are drawn on no page. A contents page is ink, printed once and left behind as soon as the reader has turned past it; the list beside the page belongs to the file, and it follows a reader who is on page four hundred back to the chapter they wanted.

What it does on a real document

A handbook, a catalogue, a contract, a set of accounts: anything a reader arrives in the middle of. A file may also ask that the panel be standing open the moment it is opened, which is the difference between a document that explains itself and one somebody has to be shown.

The lines are written as the document is written, and each names a place in the file rather than a page number. A chapter that moves because a paragraph grew takes its line with it, and nothing has to be renumbered afterwards.

Where it comes from, and why

The word is the ribbon or the strip of card a reader left between two pages to come back to them. It has been borrowed twice since — once by the browser, once here — and both times it kept the one thing that mattered about the ribbon: somewhere you meant to return to.

See it on a finished document

Internal and external links A handbook that says how it wants to be read