The markdown standard provides a markup-styled anchor mechanism (according to and discussed on stackoverflow) whereby an article may include anchors which can be linked to. Reference links then have the effect of scrolling the browser to the spot linked. E.g., the article might look like:
# My Header
# Another Header
# Some long header (with punctuation) -- that would be impractical to map to an id automatically
# Some header using the closed tag approach
# Some header using the "id=" parameter instead of "name="
Then internally the reference code would look like:
..blahblah.. [in the first section](#my-header) ..blah..
..blahblah..
..blahblah.. [in another place](#shorttopic) ..blah..
Externally the anchor should be: <full URL>/#shorttopic
Similarly, the markdown standard provides a [TOC] command which should be replaced with an auto-generated table of contents (which incidentally should include auto-generated reference URLs to the various anchors). But that literally inserts [TOC] in the document.
All of this is broken on steemit.com.