Re: [whatwg] alternate ids for elements

Julian Reschke <julian.reschke@gmx.de> writes:

> On 2014-12-03 15:02, Jukka K. Korpela wrote:
>> 2014-12-03, 15:49, Julian Reschke wrote:
>>
>>> I have a use case where a certain location in a document can have two
>>> anchors (or even more). For instance, in a spec, the author may have
>>> specified an anchor, but a section-number based anchor is required as
>>> well.
>>
>> Can you elaborate on that? Why cannot you use the same id attribute
>> value in all references to an element?
>
> 1.) An author-supplied anchor may change, but you want to preserve 
> existing "deep" links from other documents.

The solution seems simple to me: Do not change the anchor id,
ever. Alternatively, wrap the element in a div with a new id.

> 2.) You may want to support anchors based on section numbers which will 
> allow other parties to link to a specific section of the document while 
> only knowing the section number and a template (think references to 
> sections numbers in RFCs over on tools.ietf.org).

I suspect that “section number” and “id” refer to different concepts.

>>> How about a new attribute "alt-ids" which would take a space-separated
>>> list of additional anchors?
>>
>> What would be the use of such additional identifiers?
>
> See above. Essentially aliases for anchors.
>
>> The only thing I can imagine right now is a situation where you have an
>> existing id attribute and references to it all around but now need to
>> refer from a context that imposes its own restrictions on the syntax.
>> Say, you have id="παράδειγμα" and you need to refer to the element using
>> a URL like http://example.com/foo.html#παράδειγμ" but cannot because
>> the URL needs to be used in an environment where Greek letters cannot be
>> used. But this sounds like a rather rare occasion.
>
> It's yet another use case that could be addressed that way.

I think this use case could be solved by either URL encoding or
transliterating to ASCII.

-- 
Nils Dagsson Moskopp // erlehmann
<http://dieweltistgarnichtso.net>

Received on Wednesday, 3 December 2014 14:30:40 UTC