In #606 Luke @lhmarsden proposed and implemented some improvements to the CF home page that had been developed in discussions at annual workshops.

A side-effect of this renovation is that the quick links section now appears later in the page. It's not as quick to use as before, because first you have to scroll down to reach it. It could instead fit quite nicely in the blank space to the right of the section with "Ask a question" and the links and buttons for latest versions. However, this can't be achieved in Markdown, which has no mechanism for a multi-column arrangement.

In preparing the revisions to the page, Luke found he was not able to make some other desired improvements, also because of limitations of Markdown.

These limitations can be avoided by writing the body of the page in HTML instead of Markdown. It can still be contained in a markdown .md file, to produce the header and the navigation. This compromise is used by the Conventions page, which is in a two-column arrangement, implemented originally by @mattben when the CF website migrated to GitHub a decade ago.

Following this example, I have rewritten the CF home page using HTML, in order to move the quick links into the blank space further up. This is what it looks like. I haven't changed any of the content, except that I have retitled "Quick links" as "Other resources". This seems better to me, because they're no quicker than the other direct links on the page, and most of them aren't linked elsewhere in the website (to me, "quick link" implies it's a shortcut).

The HTML is a bit more complicated than Markdown, but not difficult, and I have added a comment explaining it. In HTML, we can't use Markdown variables for the URLs linked (the hrefs). I would argue that this isn't really a problem, because none of them is used more than once anyway, so they don't avoid any problems of inconsistency. In fact, I think the explicit links may be better for maintenance. Whereas the URL appears only where it's needed (in the href), the Markdown variables are collected at the end of the file. There are some that actually aren't used at all, presumably legacies, but that isn't obvious.

Enhancement proposals must be approved by a member of the Information Management and Support Team, the Conventions Committee and Standard Names Committee, or the Governance Panel.
A proposer cannot approve their own enhancement.
After three weeks have elapsed for comments, if no objections are raised, the proposal can be approved and the proposal merged.