Attribute references

[Aaron VonderHaar]

I was thinking about this a while ago, and my idea was, why not
automatically put an id on every header?  For example,

===
## The Lousiana Purchase

Napolean was, unquestionably, a brilliant military strategist, but he
was not a very good real estate manager.
===

(nothing has been added to the syntax)

would produce

===
<h2 id="the_louisiana_purchase">The Louisiana Purchase</h2>

<p>Napolean was, unquestionably, a brilliant military strategist, but
he was not a very good real estate manager.</p>
===

using some hopefully simple mechanism of convert-to-lowercase,
remove-symbols, replace-spaces to generate the id.

That is, /every/ header would automaticaly have an id.

A big advantage is that not only do you get id's in your documents,
you also get id's in /other/ people's HTML, ripe for linking.

Anyways, just a though.

--Aaron VonderHaar


On Sun,  9 Jan 2005 13:19:39 -0500, John Gruber <gruber at fedora.net> wrote:
> Here's an idea that struck me yesterday while out for a walk. (I
> should take more walks.)
> 
> People, including me, want the ability to assign classes and id's to
> block elements in Markdown. I.e. it'd be nice if you could somehow
> assign id's to headers in long documents, so you can create inline
> #anchors.
> 
> But I kept thinking that adding support for two new attributes --
> `class` and `id` -- had the potential to junk up the syntax. Plus,
> what about other attributes? What about `style`?
> 
> So I took a step backward, and realized the better solution would be
> a single syntax for applying tag attributes. Imagine this:
> 
>     ## The Lousiana Purchase  {lp}
> 
>     Napolean was, unquestionably, a brilliant military strategist, but
>     he was not a very good real estate manager.
> 
>     {lp}: id="louisiana-purchase"  class="h2-section-start"
> 
> Which would generate:
> 
>     <h2 id="louisiana-purchase"  class="h2-section-start">
>     The Louisiana Purchase</h2>
> 
>     <p>Napolean was, unquestionably, a brilliant military strategist, but
>     he was not a very good real estate manager.</p>
> 
> The similarity to link references is, hopefully, obvious. I'm
> thinking there would *only* be this reference-style syntax, with no
> provision for assigning tag attributes inline in the article text
> itself. (If you want to do that, just use real HTML tags.)
> 
> One advantage of this is that for something like classes, you can
> define one class attribute defintion, and reuse it on as many
> elements as you need.
> 
> One disadvantage is that you could do the same thing with id's,
> which of course would produce invalid HTML if the same `id` value is
> used on more than one element per page. I think we'll just have to
> trust the user to know what they're doing here -- if you don't know
> the rules of HTML, it's unlikely you'd ever use this anyway.
> 
> The only thing I'm not sure about is what the rules should be for
> how these attribute references are assigned. For headers, I'm
> imagining they would be assigned by putting them at the end of the
> header text:
> 
>     ## Like This  {foo}
> 
>     Or Like This  {foo}
>     -------------------
> 
> Although I'm not sure what to do about #-style headers that use
> closing #'s. I guess we could support both:
> 
>     ## This {foo} ##
> 
>     ## That ## {foo}
> 
> Assigning to normal paragraphs should be easy, too. Just stick the
> `{...}` at the end of the paragraph.
> 
> But, how would one assign attributes to an entire list? Not just to
> individual items in the list, but the `<ol>` or `<ul>` tags?
> 
> Or to a code block or blockquote?
> 
> The best I can think of for elements such as these is that the
> `{...}` could come on a line by itself after the element. (Or maybe
> before?)
> 
> So to assign an attribute reference to a list:
> 
>     * This
>     * That
>     * The other
> 
>     {foo}
> 
>     Now back to regular text.
> 
> Comments/suggestions welcome.
> 
> -J.G.