No ditch that, they seemed to have picked the style up from wiki, which of course picked the style up from older sources.

I wonder if EMacs is the Ur-Text:

https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/PermanentAnchors

Markdown also uses named references that look similar.

The anchored “named target” syntax of HTML of course replicates this from a functional perspective. That convention being suggested, of course, by TBL.

Whenever I see things align link this, I usually assume that people were pulling from some Ur-technology or Ur-convention.

I’ve honestly never seen that citation method before. My guess was that they are placeholders for citations in a draft document, and that he would eventually replace them with a style appropriate for whatever publication he wrote it up for. But as we know, he never published.

Glad you liked the post – I think it may have been a bit niche even for “Followers…”