Linking to blocks / Autogenerating IDs for blocks

[Witoso]

📝 Provide a description of the new feature

Context

This feature idea came from the work on the Bookmarks (#1944). When we were working on it, we tried to understand how bookmarks should behave on block elements. Should they be added "inside" the block (think a inside figure element) or before? How user interaction should look? What integrators that create their own block widgets would need to think about?

In the end, we decided that bookmarks will be added before those elements. This saved us some amount of time, making the feature more consistent and simpler.

But having linkable blocks is an interesting idea, so we want to gather feedback.

A linkable block is basically an element that a user can link to:

• heading,
• table,
• paragraph,
• image,
• and others...

For the simplicity's sake, let's only think for now about the scenario when a block is in the same document as the link to it.

Flow 1:

1. Select a table.
2. Copy its ID (link).
3. Create a link to it.

Or

Flow 2:

1. I open a link insertion interface.
2. I select a specific table from the prefilled list.

The first flow sounds more reasonable, in the second one how would we determine the name of table, paragraph, image on the list? Filename, caption, preview of content? Tricky.

Of course, this could go further into linking blocks across editors. Notion style UI comes to mind with Copy link to block:

Scope

To fulfill linking to blocks, we would need to:

• autogenerate ID for each block automatically if it's not present. Figure out duplication, copy/pasting id collision detection, etc.
• provide user actions, such as as copy id/copy link, and give integrators options to work with them (the editor knows nothing about the links to full links assets).
• extend the linking interface to allow linking to blocks in the same editor as well as in other documents.
• another aspect would be showing the anchors to block in the editor. The most known pattern for headings is a # mark before the heading. A user clicks on it, navigates, the URL in the browser changes and it can be copied. But this is a pattern for the published content. To be refined in the future.

Materials

• https://amberwilson.co.uk/blog/are-your-anchor-links-accessible/

---

If you'd like to see this feature implemented, add a 👍 reaction to this post.

[CobriMediaJulien]

That would be awesome!