Re: generating a repeatable unique id

On Sunday July 29 2001 12:28 AM (or a little before, since my clock as I
reply says 11.00 BST)
Sebastian Rahtz wrote:

> All well and easy, if the <div> elements have ID attributes, but they
> don't. And generate-id() is not guarenteed to be the same on the next
> iteration (well, it isn't with libxslt, at least).

Ouch! Looks like I've got the wrong end of yet another stick. I know
that different XSLT processors aren't obliged (or even likely) to return
the same value for generate-id called on a given node, but is it in fact
permissible for the same processor to return a different generated id
for the same node on different runs? If so, I have a whole lot of
problems lurking that I'm not prepared for. So far, Xalan has always
behaved deterministically, returning the same value for identical nodes
in identical contexts over different runs. I was careless enough to
assume things were meant to be that way, and I've quite a bit of
important code that will break if that assumption ever proves false.

Michael
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Michael Beddow   http://www.mbeddow.net/
XML and the Humanities page:  http://xml.lexilog.org.uk/
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