1156936 - Stop generating ugly ids that unnecessarily to conform to HTML 4.01

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(developer.mozilla.org Graveyard :: General, enhancement)

Description

[Florian Scholz (Open Web Docs)]

What feature should be changed? Please provide the URL of the feature if possible.
==================================================================================
We are generating section ids that conform to HTML 4.01

HTML 4.01
> ID and NAME tokens must begin with a letter ([A-Za-z]) and may be followed by any number of
> letters, digits ([0-9]), hyphens ("-"), underscores ("_"), colons (":"), and periods (".").

See https://github.com/mozilla/kuma/blob/master/kuma/wiki/tests/test_content.py#L390

def test_non_ascii_section_headers(self):
  headers = [
    (u'Documentation à propos de HTML',
      'Documentation_.C3.A0_propos_de_HTML'),
    (u'Outils facilitant le développement HTML',
      'Outils_facilitant_le_d.C3.A9veloppement_HTML'),
    (u'例:\u00a0スキューと平行移動',          '.E4.BE.8B.3A_.E3.82.B9.E3.82.AD.E3.83.A5.E3.83.BC.E3.81.A8.E5.B9.B3.E8.A1.8C.E7.A7.BB.E5.8B.95'),
    (u'例:\u00a0回転',
      '.E4.BE.8B.3A_.E5.9B.9E.E8.BB.A2'),
    (u'Documentação',
    'Documenta.C3.A7.C3.A3o'),
  ]


However, as of HTML5
> There are no other restrictions on what form an ID can take


We should still be doing some adjustments, though. Like spaces to underscore, for example.

What problems would this solve?
===============================
Localizers are having a hard time linking to fragment ids of their documents:
https://developer.mozilla.org/ru/docs/Tools/Page_Inspector/UI_Tour#.D0.9F.D0.B0.D0.BD.D0.B5.D0.BB.D1.8C_HTML

We have to link to release notes like this, too:
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Firefox/Releases/40#Interfaces.2FAPIs.2FDOM

Who would use this?
===================
Everyone.

What would users see?
=====================
Better fragment identifiers.

Like:

https://developer.mozilla.org/ru/docs/Tools/Page_Inspector/UI_Tour#Панель_HTML
and 
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Firefox/Releases/40#Interfaces/API/DOM

What would users do? What would happen as a result?
===================================================
Readable URLs is a best practice.

Is there anything else we should know?
======================================
Existing deep links with the escaped fragment identifiers will be gone. This might break deep links with these fragment identifiers from inside MDN and from external sites using these.

This was probably implemented for compliance with how MindTouch generated these fragment ids – the HTML 4 way.

Comment 1

[Justin Crawford [:hoosteeno] [:jcrawford]]

:fscholz, can you dig into the implications of this change and make a more detailed suggestion (or PR) based on that analysis?

Comment 2

[Florian Scholz (Open Web Docs)]

Interesting post:
https://mathiasbynens.be/notes/html5-id-class

Seems like MediaWiki has a similar ticket open:
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T59093
and also thoughts about special chars:
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T26918

I am trying to write a PR for this.

Comment 3

[James Bennett [:ubernostrum]]

This was in fact done for compatibility with MindTouch, because that was how MindTouch handled non-ASCII characters, and at the time of the MindTouch-to-kuma migration it appeared we would need to preserve the ID-generation behavior of MindTouch to avoid breaking links to specific sections of MDN articles.

See bug 747403 and bug 776703 for the history.

Comment 4

[MDN Team (:mdn-dev)]

Commits pushed to master at https://github.com/mozilla/kuma

https://github.com/mozilla/kuma/commit/3ea15af8f694dcdaf3457128614174c595066d6e
Fix bug 1156936: No longer escape section ids

https://github.com/mozilla/kuma/commit/6b65550f59b7cdf4db2e8fcb97f330a05c8e4fe7
Merge pull request #3246 from groovecoder/bug1156936

Fix bug 1156936: No longer escape section ids