On Dec 8, 2009, at 12:26 PM, William Stein wrote: > 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.
Any referenced directly to beezer would break, but I'm more OK with that. Alternatively, one could create and upload to a subdirectory, where the name beezer would not conflict. >> 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. The idea is that one would never need to change them. (Scanning the worksheets is fragile anyways.) > 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. I had not realized you were thinking about introducing *relative* labels. Yes, that makes much more sense, and I think solves all the issues. - Robert -- 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
