Aryeh Gregor wrote:
First of all, all auto-generated internal links (in TOCs) will
automatically switch to the new format. Second of all, it should be
one extra line of code to fix up all manually-created internal links
as well, so that the x is automatically added as part of the encoding
process. (I didn't find where this needed to be done at a quick
glance.) So we're only talking about external links here.
This is a one-time cost and I don't think it's a big problem -- at
worst, a few users will end up on the wrong part of the page. It
should be pointed out that this will affect *all* section links on
non-Latin wikis (since they get encoded to begin with dots and then
need to start with a letter), but again, only as a one-time cost, and
only external links (links from external sites or links using external
link syntax), and it will still get viewers to almost the right place.
A point I haven't seen anyone bring up yet is that, if we're messing
with section anchors anyway, this would be a good time to try to make
them less likely to collide with other IDs on the page.
For example, now that we've forced all section anchors to start with an
ASCII letter, we could go one step further and force them to start with
an _uppercase_ ASCII letter. Since most if not all of our other ID
attributes start with a lowercase letter, this would conveniently place
the two in separate namespaces.
Of course, other disambiguation methods would also be possible, but the
uppercase trick strikes me as having minimal impact -- in particular, it
just happens that most existing section headings on most of our
Latin-alphabet projects (including by far the largest one, en.wikipedia)
_already_ begin with a capital letter, and therefore will not be
affected. Indeed, this seems to hold even for our biggest project using
fully case-sensitive page names, Wiktionary.
--
Ilmari Karonen