Should lack of authored id on sections be a soft/hard error in Runestone build?

[Andrew Scholer]

Currently if an author does not include a label or xml:id on a chapter or section, the runestone manifest gets rendered with a constructed id for that division. 

Those constructed ids are of course brittle. Changing other divisions in the book could change them, which would then orphan questions, break reading assignments, etc...

It seems like failing to provide a stable authored id for these divisions should be a hard error. 

However, I'm pretty sure there are books out in the wild that don't have authored ids. So maybe a strongly worded warning/deprecation during manifest generation that spits out the currently used id and instructs the author to make it explicit?

 

The past of least damage for an author would seem to be taking the current constructed ids and explicitly applying them to the chapters/sections. mybook-1, mybook-2, are not ideal as ids, but if those are the current values being used, switching to my-book-intro, mybook-variables, ... would be much worse outside the context of making a new edition.

Andrew

[Rob Beezer]

Authors have always been encourged to use meaningful @xml:id/@label on their
divisions. That is the first place they should go.

And, yes, we can warn about this, just like we do for various Runestone exercises.

Howver, no one has ever told me that #chapter and #section identifiers went into
the database. Is that so? I know we report the structure of the chapters and
sections ("subchapter") in the manifest, but I do not know where it goes.

Rob

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[Rob Beezer]

Addressed at

https://github.com/PreTeXtBook/pretext/pull/3276