[uf-discuss] Re: Generating valid unique IDs for hAtom

[Ben Ward]

On 16 Jul 2007, at 11:08, Toby A Inkster wrote:
> As for #2, it's
> fixing the wrong problem: if changing permalinks causes the Atom ID to
> change, then you should fix your permalinks which are not supposed to
> change!

Of course _perma_links are not supposed to change. But I think the  
point that Mark Pilgrim makes, and one that I agree with, is that  
principal does and will collapse in real-world tools.

Migrating between CMS systems, rebranding to a new domain name,  
switching advocacy to support the ‘no-WWW’ movement? All perfectly  
likely and reasonable things to do, which CMS's generating permalinks  
have not been designed to support and a problem which, regardless of  
the ideal, many (most?) authors simply won't account for.

There may not be a solution to this. Fitting a tag URI into page  
content seems clumsy for sure, and those same CMS systems that make  
permalinks less-than permanent are publishing dynamically generataed  
permalink URLs as IDs all the while. I'm not sure that we're in a  
position to ‘fix’ the problem. But I think we should try to exhaust  
the non URL options thoroughly.

Ben