Use case or problem
Since most people use GitHub to store their Obsidian Vaults, compatibility with GitHub’s markdown conventions should be paramount. Ensuring maximum compatibility with GitHub makes it much easier to share vault contents with others. Instead of needing to download and install Obsidian, clone the repository and open the vault locally, they can just view the contents in GitHub’s native UI.
Obsidian markdown is already extremely GitHub-friendly, but internal links to headers are not compatible. GitHub will render a markdown header into HTML like so:
# Some Header
Rendered HTML:
<h2><a id="some-header">...</a>Some Header</h2>
To properly link to this header in GitHub markdown, you’d write a link like this:
[My Link](#some-header)
However, Obsidian does not generate links the same way. Obsidian generates links that look like this:
[My Link](#Some%20Header)
Thus, Obsidian-generated header links do not work in the GitHub UI. They only work properly when the header does not include any spaces or symbols.
Proposed solution
Instead of using HTML URL encoding for headers in Obsidian, provide the option to use GitHub-friendly encoding that converts whitespace and symbols to hyphens. (“Some Header” becomes some-header
instead of Some%20Header
)