Feature request: automatically generated ids for headers

[imsky]

@zwol

I sort-of feel like resolving this class of conflict should be the responsibility of whatever template engine is embedding Markdown content in a larger structure with existing IDs. Of course the problem with that logic is then the author of the Markdown content can no longer predict what the fragment IDs are going to be.

Right, and how about Markdown content being loaded into independent containers - now the template engine has to check IDs globally to make sure that “news-3” does not conflict with another “news-3” somewhere else on the page.

StackOverflow and Reddit don’t add any attributes to headers. Github does a workaround where it wraps the header text into a link and uses JS to make document fragments (page.html#heading URLs) work:

<h1><a name="user-content-js-conf-slides---2011" class="anchor" href="#js-conf-slides---2011" rel="noreferrer"><span class="octicon octicon-link"></span></a>JS Conf slides - 2011</h1>

In Babelmark 2, fewer parsers add attributes to headers than don’t: http://johnmacfarlane.net/babelmark2/?text=%23+Heading

Namespacing or leaving the anchoring behavior up to the template engine are the best ways to ensure that there are no conflicts with existing elements on the page.