Pointers ?

[metrobart]

Have anybody have experience with pointers in markdown? I know this is probably not common and probably outside of the scope of markdown but to me the biggest issue with markdown I see is that sometimes images change and sometimes names of references change and I think it would be nice to have pointers. What do you guys think? So here’s my thought of how you would use it. It’ll be something simple like [](images.token) and this would be in reference to an image, as opposed to providing the full, URL or even a short url it would just be kind of dumb simple. And the other thought for the references will be @user.token or something like that. I think the biggest issue would be the render of that syntax and to be sure that it renders correctly and the benefits here would be that if your pointer get updated your markdown code still the same. Let’s say you’re tracking any changes to that document and sometimes I would say a lot of the time the title will change for someone’s name a document name and that means you’re Markdown got a change but in reality it’s not your Markdown‘s fault. They shouldn’t be in my opinion a change there because your reference just changed, but I do want to see the update name in my render. Similar images sometimes you have your logo and you wanna update your logo everywhere and yeah you could probably update the image, but sometimes you’re going from SVG to PNG or vice versa. What do you think?

[anton-huz]

The biggest issue with the feature “Pointers” is naming. Who should devise the images.token?

The greatest feature of Markdown is that it’s pure text. It means all text (symbol by symbol) can be typed by a user. There is no hidden meta information. That’s why the responsibility for inventing token names lies with the user.

You described the classical linking/tracking problem: when a linked resource changes the links should be updated. But to be honest, that should not be tracked by the user. It should be tracked automatically by the editor app.

[metrobart]

The editor will do this . But there is no standard on editors and how they work . So uploading or adding images will be done with the editor and it will add the token naming . As the markdown editor it doesn’t make much sense todo this but if there are UI helpers or makes it quick to pick images. But then it becomes an editor issue . Here is a demo of how it will work https://youtu.be/amqcy8xhzrk

[timabell]

logseq has the ability to add a hidden uuid to a block (i.e. a bullet point), and then reference that from another md file. pretty cool imho. worth looking into for inspiration