Re: HTML export uses anchor ids which change on every export

[Nicolas Goaziou]

Hello,

sbaugh@catern.com writes:

> HTML export wraps headlines in anchor tags with IDs, so that they can be
> linked by suffixing #[anchor-tag-ID] to the URL.
>
> HTML export used to use anchor IDs like "sec-2" for the second headline,
> but at some point it switched to generated IDs like "org7ffb324", which
> change on every re-export.
>
> This means anchor-links on external sites (that is, links which link to
> a specific section of an org file) break every time an org file is
> re-exported to HTML. The old style of anchor IDs would break URLs when
> sections moved around, but at least it wouldn't break on every
> re-export!
>
> This makes org much less useful for typical web publishing use cases.
>
> This can be worked around by setting CUSTOM_ID for every headline, which
> will override the anchor id used, but I think it was much better when it
> just worked by default...
>
> It looks like this was changed in commit
> 459033265295723cbfb0fccb3577acbfdc9d0285
> "Export back-ends: Use `org-export-get-reference'"
>
> Perhaps this functionality (of generating anchor IDs based on the
> section number) could be added back in?

No, for public links, CUSTOM_ID is the only sane way to handle this.
Even "sec-2" could betray you if you slightly modify the document.

Regards,

-- 
Nicolas Goaziou