# Feature request: automatically generated ids for headers

**URL:** <https://talk.commonmark.org/t/feature-request-automatically-generated-ids-for-headers/115>\
**Category:** Uncategorized\
**Created:** [September 3, 2014, 9:49pm UTC](https://talk.commonmark.org/t/feature-request-automatically-generated-ids-for-headers/115 "2014-09-03T21:49:39Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Showing post:** 5

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**Author:** ![zwol](https://cdn.commonmark.org/user_avatar/talk.commonmark.org/zwol/32/63_2.png) [@zwol](https://talk.commonmark.org/u/zwol)\
**Post date:** [September 4, 2014, 12:17am UTC](https://talk.commonmark.org/t/feature-request-automatically-generated-ids-for-headers/115/5 "2014-09-04T00:17:07Z")

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> @poke said: If you would be adding automatically generated ids to the standard specification, then there **absolutely must** be a clear specification of how that’s going to work.

You misunderstand me – I definitely think the algorithm should be spelled out in the spec; I just think there are several possible ways the algorithm could work and any one of them would be fine. All it _needs_ to do is generate unique-in-the-document fragment IDs, and I suppose it would be nice (but not strictly necessary, because you can always \-escape) if they were valid CSS `#name` tokens.

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