Most ghastly link fragment anchor names

[jidanni]

Excuse me, I've not even heard of Doxygen for five minutes. In fact my only contact with it was trying to make a permalink to
https://gdal.org/doxygen/classOGRGeometry.html#:~:text=Centroid()
which you see I have managed to do via Google :~: stuff, and risky "()" to make sure I got to the right spot. But that's life.

Yes, I would rather have used real HTML links that will work in all browsers, like the ones Doxygen makes,
https://gdal.org/doxygen/classOGRGeometry.html#a91787f669b2a148169667e270e7e40df
but did you notice that ghastly #a91787f669b2a148169667e270e7e40df there at the end?
How long will that last? Till the next revision?
And OK, even if it is a permalink, it is not a permalink that one can be proud of or that one can know where one is going before arriving.

Let's see how the other folks do it:
(No need to click it. I'm just showing how the URL is composed:)
https://gdal.org/user/ogr_sql_dialect.html#ogr-geom-area
There, nice, clean, low key. The perfect balance between...
We're talking the Zen masters of link fragment naming!
Maybe users need to manually choose the names. I don't know. All I know is it's better that those godforsaken obnoxious barcode-like ASCII porridge Doxygen style link fragments.

Also, I noticed they managed to keep the name of their document system out of the URL. But maybe that's configurable...

[albert-github]

• What is the exact question?
• Which version of doxygen are you using?

In general:

• Can you please attach a, small, self contained example (source+configuration file in a, compressed, tar or zip file!) that allows us to reproduce the problem? Please don't add external links as they might not be persistent (also references to GitHub repositories are considered non persistent).
• Please also specify the full doxygen version used (doxygen -v).

Regarding:

Yes, I would rather have used real HTML links that will work in all browsers, like the ones Doxygen makes,
https://gdal.org/doxygen/classOGRGeometry.html#a91787f669b2a148169667e270e7e40df
but did you notice that ghastly #a91787f669b2a148169667e270e7e40df there at the end?
How long will that last? Till the next revision?

This link should not change. Doxygen tries to keep these hashes stable and only change them when there is no other way.
Another way for you might be to have a look at the \anchor command where you can define your own anchors and refer to them (e.g. through the \ref command in doxygen).

[jidanni]

I have never used Doxygen. I am just trying to make a hyperlink to a place in somebody else's document that was created with apparently Doxygen.

It's good that there is \anchor etc. but I think you should start considering changing the default link style too, as that's apparently what most people use. Thanks.

[albert-github]

I have never used Doxygen. I am just trying to make a hyperlink to a place in somebody else's document that was created with apparently Doxygen.

Best to ask the creator of the document whether it is reasonable that you link to the mentioned place or should link to another place.
In case it is reasonable to link to the mentioned place suggest to the creator to use the \anchor command.

[jidanni]

By the way, come to think about it, the very long IDs are overkill. The most internal links needed in a single web page could be handled by #l9999 length links. In fact they could start at #l0 and grow as long as needed.

[doxygen]

@jidanni The IDs are md5 hashes for the signature of the item they link to. So they should be quite persistent. If you think about member overloads, you'll quickly understand that a readable anchor is not really possible in general. Otherwise you end up with something like this where a -number is used to distinguish between the methods, which is not very stable or intuitive.