@Jellby
Thanks for the example.
I'm not sure, if it fits my own taste of a TOC, but I respect of course, that such wishes for TOCs exist.
I've never saw it in book.
May be an utopian spec could react to such special cases with a special treatment of the specific HTML element, which should appear inside the TOC.
It could get a specific class. And the content of the TOC entry could be placed e.g. in a title attribute.
<p id="thorsmap" class="toc" title="Thror's map">...</p>
In my view it highly valuable, when standard cases do not need any extra work/files from an editor to offer access to a nice TOC.
Did I mention, that I dream of an utopian web standard, where the complete navigation is generated by the user agent (browser) and not anymore manually in thousands of styles by the webauthor.
Navigation has to be under full control of the user - IMHO.
The web author should just provide structure.
In the past, Firefox offered a toolbar which interpretes some meta elements for navigation. But Mozilla kicked it.
There's a wonderful tiny project
http://www.standard-sitemap.org/fire...tension.en.php
which allows to feel how nice and consistent web navigation could be - in a better world
But the most user are used to bad information architecture. Resign, ignorance, silent suffering ...
There are many causes that better usability will never have a chance.