Re: [xsl] generating a repeatable unique id

["Alexander Gutman" <gutman at novosoft-us dot com>]

Michael Beddow wrote:
> 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?

Alas, this is so. As W3C says, "An implementation is under no obligation
to generate the same identifiers each time a document is transformed."

Actually, the available implementations are usually "stateless" as regards
generated identifiers, but, any way, the document can "slightly" change
after some "previous" transformation (for instance, an absent XML
declaration can be added) and, as a result, the identifiers will also
change even in the case of a "stateless" implementation.

-- 
Alexander E. Gutman

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