The ability of IDs in conjunction with IDREFs to tie together parts of a
document not in hierarchical relationship is valuable. The uniqueness of
IDs may or may not be of interest in such a case (non-unique IDs may
simulate the class attribute used in HTML).
Jeff
----- Original Message -----
From: "Gavin Thomas Nicol" <>
To: <>
Sent: Monday, November 12, 2001 8:55 PM
Subject: Re: [xml-dev] IDs considered harmful or why keys might be better
than IDs...
> On Monday 12 November 2001 11:34 pm, Jonathan Borden wrote:
> I can honestly say that I find ID attributes to be of little value. In the
> (more years than I care to remember) that I have used SGML and XML, I have
> not once (seriously NEVER) used the ID-ness for anything other than
> validation... and that was only because SGML provided no way other than ID
to
> guarantee that the attribute values were unique. At the application level
> (validation generally occured before the data is deployed) being able to
> count on unique values (and even then, scoped by markup or other
application
> conventions) is all that ever mattered... and I've built a *lot* of
> applications.
