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Re: IDs considered harmful or why keys might be better than ID

• To: "Eric van der Vlist" <vdv@d...>, <xml-dev@l...>
• Subject: Re: IDs considered harmful or why keys might be better than IDs...
• From: "Jonathan Borden" <jborden@m...>
• Date: Mon, 12 Nov 2001 07:53:36 -0500
• References: <3BEF9991.9080102@d...>

Eric van der Vlist wrote:

>
> I have mixed feelings about this long discussion about XML IDs.
>
> On one hand, the concept of ID seems to be very useful and we obviously
> need unique IDs to avoid ambiguity.
>
> OTH, can an ID for application X be exactly the same than an ID for
> application Y? Can we be sure that their needs will be close enough to
> guarantee that they will refer to the same "object" with the same scope?

An ID is the name of a subresource (fragment) that _the document asserts_.
Applications are free to use these document defined names, or choose others.

Fragment identifiers of URIs are intended to be parsed according to media
type (perhaps application/xml) and as such the idea that there is an "XML
name" for a fragment of a document is a completely valid one, of course
realizing that other applications may choose to name things in different
ways. For example XSLT keys or XML Schema keys, the point being that if the
HTTP server returns the document of media type application/xml, that the
fragment identifier will have a consistent interpretation. It is important
to start with this as a basis.

Jonathan

• Follow-Ups:
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    • From: Eric van der Vlist <vdv@d...>

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