Discovering permanent anchors

[martinthomson]

In the anchors section of the working mode there is a process for negotiating the creation of a permanent anchor. This is good, but that process does not describe how to discover whether a permanent anchor already exists. If it were possible to discover that an anchor is permanent, then there might be fewer requests.

I couldn't see any reference to a permanent anchor having been requested or executed either, nor could I see anything in fetch or html source, so I don't know whether this policy is in active use.

[dbaron]

This policy comes from whatwg/meta#84 and #72 (which I somehow managed to entirely miss).

[annevk]

When we made the policy we deferred working on tooling as per whatwg/meta#84 (comment) onward. Seems like there are two main requirements:

1. Do not regress on exposing it. (There's a tricky bit here that requires some editor care in that in theory you could preserve it while it identifies a different thing. That's not acceptable, but harder to enforce automatically.)
2. Make them discoverable.

[domenic]

On no-regression, I think we can easily enforce this in tooling. Bikeshed already has Required IDs metadata; we need to add something similar to Wattsi.

On discoverability, I think it should just be a matter of looking at the issue tracker's issues tagged "anchor permanence".

[annevk]

whatwg/wattsi#128 tracks the remaining automation issue.

https://github.com/search?q=org%3Awhatwg+label%3A%22anchor+permanence%22 finds all requests. I'll PR the Working Mode to link that.