Enable external links via #section-title

[andre-dietrich]

1. Link to sections via #section-title

Currently sections are identified by numbers as URL-fragments ?https://course-url#slideNumber. It is possible to use the slide number as local references [link](#123) but it is also possible to use title tags [link](#some-title). However, linking to a certain section from another website or course, is currently only possible via section numbers. By using section-titles, linking would still work even if the structure of the course has changed.

Thus, linking to slides should be possible via:

• https://liascript.../?course-url#12
• https://liascript.../?course-url#section-title

2. Link to fragments (animation steps)

A section can contain multiple fragments, that are currently visible only in Presentation-mode. It could be beneficial to provide also references to these "subsections" such as [link](#section-title;fragmentNumber) and also to allow external links to point to specific animation steps. However, this breaks the common Markdown semantic and would not be compatible to other Markdown reader/interpreter anymore.

Maybe the fragment could be provided as part of the link title, that is then interpreted a bit differently:

[fragment-2](#section-title)

Or there is another kind of reference-syntax that I am currently not aware of, that allows to add additional information to a local reference?

[pwab]

This is maybe an individual feature request but it seems to be relevant to this one:
I stumbled across VuePress which is able to react on scrolling in that way that it changes the url according to the current viewed section. You can see this behavior in their own guide - you just have to scroll and look at the url.

Would this be possible to implement for liascript too?

[andre-dietrich]

Actually this is an interesting feature request ... I have look at some elm-projects, how something similar could be achieved. It is actually a new feature request... Originally I wanted to add a way, so that you can easily link to sections, as it is also done on github or on most websites via #anchor-name. This works no, so you can change the order of your content, and do not have to add the section-number all the time. But, i was also thinking about ways to reference a certain "animation fragment" like on PowerPoint, or how it is done for example on articulate, where you can take different "course-paths" by walking only through some of the animation-steps, not through 1 -> 2 -> 3 -> 4 => Next Slide -> 1 ...

At the moment I had no real beautiful idea, that works well with standard-Markdown. So I was only thinking out l***writing...

Another idea, related to you feature, was also to add something like a column-view for larger screens that mirror some kind of newspaper... It worked somehow, nicely with the HTML column-attributes, but it had some issues, where we would require some kind of typesetting capabilities like in Tex or at least some optimizations ...

[BeastyBlacksmith]

Is it possible to link to other markdown files and get the rendered result and not the raw text?

[andre-dietrich]

@BeastyBlacksmith Hi, what do you mean by rendered result?

1. Do you mean something like a summary.md as it is used in gitbook to generate a larger project out of some smaller chapters?

   This is at the moment not possible 🙈

2. Or do you just want to open another markdown-file as a course?

   In this case you simply have to add the LiaScript-URL:

   [other course](https://liascript.github.io/course/?URL_OF_THE_REMOTE_MD_FILE)

3. This is also possible, you can highlight another course as a preview-card, within a Markdown-file or within another website:

   https://aizac.herokuapp.com/markdown-just-got-a-new-preview-tag/

Hope this helps...

[BeastyBlacksmith]

1. Do you mean something like a summary.md as it is used in gitbook to generate a larger project out of some smaller chapters?

Yes, I was looking for this

[andre-dietrich]

This is not possible atm ... It will require to change the entire parsing process, but it is definitely something that we also have in mind for the future ...