Not useful MDN links from BCD only reload the current page

[pepelsbey]

Description

While adding missing mdn_url links to BCD, I found one kind of BCD table that’s not useful or even confusing for our readers:

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/CSS/factory_functions_static#browser_compatibility

For most of the CSS static methods, there are no dedicated pages, apart from a few interesting ones:

• highlights
• registerProperty()
• supports()

The rest are quite boring, so in BCD mdn_url just goes to one page they’re listed on.

So, in the BCD table:

• If you click on the highlights static property link, you’ll get useful info on a dedicated page
• If you click the grad() static method link, you’ll just reload the same page and end up at the top of it

And there’s no way to tell whether the link is useful or not. But that’s only for MDN readers. For other users of BCD, this link might still be helpful.

Suggested solution

I think we could/should filter out links in the BCD table which point to the page you're on, unless they point to a section (that still seems useful), but just going to the top of the page feels useless and frustrating, yeah
@LeoMcA

[caugner]

This is a bit similar to mdn/browser-compat-data#29242, except that the MDN urls don't get removed, as they don't duplicate an ancestor.

It would probably makes sense to audit MDN URLs appearing more than once in BCD.

[LeoMcA]

Indeed, I thought of that issue too: but as you say, this link isn't actually on the ancestor (though maybe it should be!)

Audit sounds sensible, but I think this issue should still also be solved in the compat's table render logic. If it's about to render a link to the top of the page its on, don't do that. (However, if that same table is being rendered on a different page, do render it - that's unlikely to happen at the moment, but could, and will work nicely if we ever want to build something like a BCD explorer).