Re: [xml-dev] IDs considered harmful or why keys might be better thanIDs...

[David Carlisle <davidc@nag.co.uk>]

> So why do we need _another_ mechanism to declare IDs?
'cause if your document is docbook+mathml that's hundreds of elements
all of which have an ID .

If you specify the full DTD in the external subset and then redeclare IDs
in the internal subset some parsers will warn about duplicate declarations
(its only a warning but standardising on something that parsers warn
about seems odd) If you don't put the full DTD in the external subset
your document isn't valid (which you might care about).

You can't easily put the full DTD in the internal subset (at least not
by cut and paste) as it uses constructs not allowed there.

If you declare all the ID attributes your local subset
is unmanagebale, if you only declare the ones you need you have to keep 
editing that as you edit the document, which is hard to describe and
hard to arrange in many editing interfaces.

None of these problems is impossible to work round, but surely it is
legitimate to ask if it's possible to set up the ground rules in a way
that makes all of this easier to describe?

David

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