Hi Folks,

Common practice in XML design is to liberally sprinkle id attributes throughout the XML. Why? Because it facilitates intra-document linking (via the id-idref mechanism) and inter-document linking.

The following example shows the use of an id attribute to facilitate an intra-document reference:

JSON does not have attributes. The JSON Reference specification [1] defines a syntax for intra-document and inter-document references and it does not use anything like an id attribute. The above intra-document reference is expressed like this:

{ "$ref": "#/Library/BookCatalogue/Book" }

Lesson Learned: when converting XML to JSON you can safely drop all id attributes.

/Roger

[1] http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-pbryan-zyp-json-ref-03