Timothy <tecos...@gmail.com> writes: >> Link stability is still an issue, even if the proposal gives a false >> sense of security in that area. I don't think we can solve it without >> creating a cache for export, where you store all previous references for >> a given file. Even this is not sufficient, because you can export >> buffers not attached to files. > > To me this is a case of "don't let the perfect be the enemy of the > good", though I do see that a false sense of security may be > problematic, I consider the benefits to outweigh this.
I would like to revive this thread as we now have an important development happened after this discussion -- org-persist library. It can handle caching without a need to have a dedicated cache implementation for every use-case. To summarize the previous discussion: - Org export currently generates ugly link anchors, which degrade the export output quality. In particular, html export can generate link anchors like https://orgmode.org/worg/org-contrib/babel/languages/ob-doc-ditaa.html#org96b5528 Note that randomly generated #org96b5528 anchor - The anchors are not just unreadable, but also change on every single export. (Except for ox-publish, which maintains anchor cache; but not all the people use or need publishing) - The random anchors are there for a reason: it is difficult to derive anchors based on the heading title/contents and avoid duplicates and also keep track of the same heading being modified. If we have * duplicated heading Text * duplicated heading Text we cannot usefully derive the anchor from the identical headings even worse * unique heading * duplicated heading can be changed to * duplicated heading * duplicated heading and we cannot find out which old anchor was for which heading - Further, there appears to be no suitable _universal_ algorithm to generate human-readable anchors. Timothy proposed one, but it does not work well for non-Latin text. ---------------------------- Proposal: 1. To avoid collisions, we can add randomness to the anchors: * This is headline will be #this-is-headline-<4 random letters> 2. The generated anchors will be cached according to headline text + headline contents + headline number in the document via org-persist. During consequent exports, if two out of the three keys match, we take the cached anchor. 3. Instead of trying to find a silver bullet for human-readable anchor generator, we allow users to customize it. The default will be constant "org" yielding "org-Ajjq"-type anchors, just like we have now. But we can also provide other generators, like the one Timothy proposed, or better versions contributed in future if there is demand. WDYT? -- Ihor Radchenko // yantar92, Org mode contributor, Learn more about Org mode at <https://orgmode.org/>. Support Org development at <https://liberapay.com/org-mode>, or support my work at <https://liberapay.com/yantar92>
