TYPO3 Core

In the very, very past you could add a link to a part of, for instance, the header of a content element. This could be done by using

This is the <link 999>linked part</link> of the header

The header was parsed using parseFunc =< lib.parseFunc like currently is still done with the tt_content "bodytext" field, although it uses lib.parseFunc_RTE instead of lib.parseFunc. This parsing seems to have been removed a very long time ago, but the soft references are still used in some fields. For the "pages" table, some unused fields have possible soft references, but are not in use by default. These fields are meant for some metadata which should not contain images or links

• abstract (softref = rtehtmlarea_images,typolink_tag) Can stay. This is not meta data
• description (softref = rtehtmlarea_images,typolink_tag)
• keywords (softref = rtehtmlarea_images,typolink_tag)

• header (softref = typolink_tag)

Since the introduction of the field "header_link" linking the header can only be done by using this field.