On Tue, Dec 8, 2009 at 12:31 PM, Robert Bradshaw
<rober...@math.washington.edu> wrote:
> On Dec 8, 2009, at 11:54 AM, William Stein wrote:
>
>> On Tue, Dec 8, 2009 at 11:04 AM, Robert Bradshaw
>> <rober...@math.washington.edu> wrote:
>>>
>>>
>>> I think you misunderstood my proposal--
>>
>> Yes, I'm sure I did, since I also don't understand your further
>> explanation of it below.
>>
>>> all the user would see is the
>>> friendly name, which the user could change. The ID would just be
>>> stored internally. It would help with situation where multiple
>>> worksheets might have the same name (e.g. say I sent you a bundle of
>>> worksheets "heegner" and "kolyvagen," where the latter referenced the
>>
>> By "name" what do you mean? I view worksheets as having a title and
>> (in future) a label:
>>
>> title -- that big long title with spaces, etc., that users might
>> change all the time at their whim
>>
>> label -- a valid identifier, like \label{...} in latex; usually not
>> changed.
>>
>> I don't know what you mean by "name".
>
> That is what you are calling label--the user-friendly identifier
> shorter than the title. I was thinking label would be like in latex,
> so you could label cells, figures, etc. within a worksheet by placing
> the equivalent of a \label{...} directive.
I guess I thought of it somewhat differently, because it would be one
label per worksheet. But maybe it should be possible to label cells
too, so one can avoid having to figure out their id numbers...
>
>>> former, but you already had a worksheet with name/id "heegner." It
>>> could also handle if, the next day, I sent you an updated "kolyvagen"
>>> and when you uploaded it it would link to the correct "heegner" (or
>>> whatever you had to rename it to)).
>>
>> How would the cross referencing work exactly from a user's point of
>> view? I think it's absolutely critical that the url's be meaningful
>> to users, just like latex labels, html urls and wiki pages all use
>> meaningful url's for user edited content.
>
> They would see and use the label, not the underlying id. The exact
> label <-> id correspondence could be unique to a server.
>
>>> There's also the situation where I
>>> could be working on a set of worksheets on my own machine and then
>>> uploading them to a public server later to share. If I changed a
>>> label
>>> on my own machine, it could do a find-and-replace there, but would of
>>> course break cross references on the server unless I re-uploaded the
>>> whole connected component.
>>>
>>> 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?
>
> It's useful because one could share/move worksheets around between
> servers without having to manually worry about keeping labels unique.
I don't understand that at all. If I have an account and I have two
labels that are the same, then what? How does having an ID help?
> Re-labeling would not break cross-references. Maybe that's what one
> wants though, \cite{x} would refer to the not to a specific worksheet,
> but whatever worksheet on this server is labeled x. (This does have
> the advantage that labels are more like paths, where one can swap one
> version in and another out by doing a simple renaming.)
I think of labels like paths. I think relabeling should break
cross-references, just like it does with HTML, wiki pages, latex, etc.
However, we should make the design so that (1) it is very rarely
necessary to relabel, and (2) we may as well make it easy on the user
if they do have to fix cross-references (e.g., by automatically
flagging all obvious places that need to be fixed and showing a list
for confirmation).
>> (2) Why don't web pages, wiki pages (?), latex documents, etc. have
>> such a unique id?
>
> Because people don't expect to move them around. Renaming a wiki page
> requires editing every page that links to it, not all of which are
> even under your control. Same with web pages, which is why you have to
> put up a redirect when you want to move pages around, so anyone going
> to the old link is told where the new content is. With tex, the user
> is simply responsible for keeping labels unique.
Yet despite all those numerous problems, people still prefer explicit
urls and labels over other approaches.
Don't worksheets get copied rather than moved? Or by "moved" do you
mean renamed on a single server?
-- William
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