On Tue, Dec 8, 2009 at 12:14 PM, Jason Grout <jason-s...@creativetrax.com> wrote: > William Stein wrote: > >>> I guess what I'm advocating is that it would be useful for the >>> underlying ID to be (probabilistically) globally unique, not just >>> unique for a user or a specific notebook server. >> >> (1) How is that useful? >> (2) Why don't web pages, wiki pages (?), latex documents, etc. have >> such a unique id? > > > How would either of you deal with the following situation: > > I have Rob Beezer's linear algebra book in Sage Worksheets, with > hundreds of cross-references between the worksheets. I want to upload > two copies of the book into my notebook server. >
The design I have in mind I came up with while flying cross-country with Rob Beezer and his book :-) > Where do the crossreferences point? I wouldn't even think about importing a book until I've implemented nested worksheets (just like nested web pages). So here's what happens: (1) You upload the first book and the absolute version of the labels are all of the form beezer/intro/label1 beezer/ch1/label1 beezer/ch1/label2 etc. Within the book, the worksheets just use labels of the form "intro/label1", "ch1/label1", etc., -- they never explicitly mention "beezer". The worksheets themselves know they are children of the "beezer" worksheet (which could be a cover page or contents page). (2) When you upload the second copy of the book, you will receive a dialog that says "The 'beezer' top level label is already defined. Name for top level label of new worksheet: [beezer2]." You can then just accept "beezer2" or change it to anything you want. > Do I get an error and have to > manually reassign all possible labels on the second version of the book? > Nope. > I can see Robert's idea working better, in that it sees that there are > conflicts, so it regenerates "unique" ids for all worksheets in the > second copy of the book upon import, automatically changing any > reference in those worksheets to use the new ids. No, it is way worse. For starters, think very carefully about how these *references* are expressed? (1) with that design the references are unreadable, (2) the references could be autogenerated as output of some sage command, hence be *impossible* to change by scanning the worksheets. With my design -- which just happens to be the bog standard design that is used everywhere (web pages, etc.), imho -- even autogenerated references would work fine (since they are relative). Plus, sticking with a standard design means it will be easier for people to understand. -- William -- To post to this group, send email to sage-support@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to sage-support+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-support URL: http://www.sagemath.org
