Hi Terry,
I don’t think it’s necessary to be combative. Rasmus is doing his best,
as are all the org developers. Sometimes things break by accident –
that is the nature of beta software. The problems you raised are
important. Let’s try to figure out how to fix them.
You wrote:
> Links may work from inside Org, but the original intent of CUSTOM_ID was
> to produce a stable ID for the HTML export that could be linked to from
> outside Org.
I think this is true. Looking at the pages in Worg, for example,
provides ample evidence of this strategy in action.
CUSTOM_ID is also sometimes needed for latex export
(cf. org-latex-prefer-user-labels). It is important for IDs to be
unique, and to conform to certain format restrictions. What if
CUSTOM_ID properties were checked for these requirements when exporting,
raising an error if they are not suitable and otherwise passing through
to the export output? This would maintain CUSTOM_ID as an interface to
labeling systems outside org (latex \ref{}, html #anchor links, ...),
but would also make export more robust. It’s also in line with recent
changes to raise export errors for undefined macros, unresolvable links,
etc.
--
Aaron Ecay
