Use case or problem
As far as I understand it, block ids are generated completely at random.
So, say a quote is referenced in 10 notes but every single one as a unique id, users cannot use blocks to identify text duplication.
Proposed Solution
I would like the random block id generator to accept seeds and by default take the block text as a seed (so from the user’s perspective, virtually nothing has changed). (I would also recommend stripping markdown syntax from the seed – e.g. - *some* text would seed as “some text” and strip out the “-” and "*"s.)
What this does is it would allow people to search for blocks that have the same text across notes. This also has the added benefit of enhancing cross-vault/user comparisons: If Bob and Alice both have block ids (or block anchor-tags/fragments in urls on the internet) that are the same, with seeded block ids, they know they have blocks that share the same text.
Current workaround
Currently, from a single user’s vault it’s trivial to search for raw text. Not aware of any workaround for published sites.
Influence
I am getting this idea from ruby’s rspec test suite, which uses seeding to reproduce previous run scenarios.
Example output:
Run options: include {:focus=>true}
All examples were filtered out; ignoring {:focus=>true}
Randomized with seed 13030
............................
Finished in 0.30302 seconds (files took 0.1896 seconds to load)
28 examples, 0 failures
Randomized with seed 13030
So you can add the randomized seed when you re-run tests to reproduce the same run order.
Some docs.
).