[uf-discuss] Generating valid unique IDs for hAtom

[Jon Gibbins (dotjay)]

I've been looking into generating unique references for entries that can 
be used in the id attribute for an hAtom implementation. Does anyone 
actually have a solution for this?

I've been using something along the lines of:
tag:example.org:2007-06-21:title-of-the-entry

It's valid HTML, but not a proper tag URI as far as I can tell from RFC 
4151. Would it be worth coming up with a microformat standard for people 
to follow that is valid HTML, using [A-Za-z][A-Za-z0-9_:\.-]? Tag URIs 
don't work and neither do permalinks? Is there another standard we can use?

Incidentally, from the microformats wiki:

"the syntax of tag URIs and html id attributes are incompatible. HTML 
disallows forward-slash (/) in ids [1] 
(http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/types.html#type-name), while tag URIs 
require them"

http://microformats.org/wiki/hatom-issues#Entry_id_.28atom:id.29

I'm too afraid of getting shouted at to go and edit the wiki, but this 
doesn't sound right to me? Forward slashes aren't *required* by the tag 
URI specification as far as I can see, but commas *are* required and not 
permitted in HTML:
http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/types.html#type-name

It still renders tag URIs inappropriate, but I think the details are 
wrong and might want correcting.

Jon

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