What is random footnote numbering?
No idea…more context? I know most of the Markdown parsers that support footnote extensions can automatically number footnotes, is that what you mean?
The only thing that comes to my mind is the random footnote anchor numbering in the HTML parsing of Markdown, like Fletcher Penney did with MultiMarkdown—see the MultiMarkdown User’s Guide and do a search for “random”.
When set to --random the parser uses random numbers (with at least four digits, it seems) instead of the [^1], [^2] the user might have used. This is useful when texts with footnotes get combined on a HTML page because every footnote anchor must not be used more than once.
I had been thinking of creating an action that generates a unique footnote anchor directly in the Markdown code—not just with a random number but with the item link (or its create time stamp) as part of the anchor. I became interested in it when MMD introduced file transclusion.
But I let it go and used MMD’s inline footnotes instead. They are simpler to handle but make the text less readable. But so do long anchors too.
Maybe I was just too lazy.