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

[Gavin Thomas Nicol <gtn@rbii.com>]

On Tuesday 13 November 2001 02:40 am, Jeff Greif wrote:
> 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).

Sure, but the non-heirarchical linking is not exclusively possible using 
ID/IDREF pairs. You can define your own structures that do this just as 
easily... and for a lot of *text*, ID/IDREF pairs are totally insufficient.

Again, beyond validation I've NEVER found the ID/IDREF information useful.