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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" <gtn@r...> To: <xml-dev@l...> Sent: Monday, November 12, 2001 8:55 PM Subject: Re: 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.
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