We touched on a really important question today - should the Id string be an opaque value whose sole purpose is to denote elements within a document, or can/should it say something semantically recognizable to users of the document?
I'm strongly with Gary on this - the Id should be an internal value with no meaning, and when qualified with another document's namespace it becomes an external value with no meaning. When something meaningful like a PURL is needed, it is supplied as a property rather than an Id. To make that obvious to readers of a document, I'd propose that the syntax of the Id be limited to a few hex digits like a Git short commit id " *dae86e*". This would allow both sequential numbers (0..n-1) and random values unique within the document, and it would remove the temptation for implementors to sneak anything else in. IMO, brevity and visually-obvious meaninglessness are both virtues of this approach. How short? 6 hex digits (16 million elements in a single document) should be sufficient, but if somebody thinks a document with 4 billion elements might be useful, we could stretch it to 8 :-). Dave -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Links: You receive all messages sent to this group. View/Reply Online (#4100): https://lists.spdx.org/g/Spdx-tech/message/4100 Mute This Topic: https://lists.spdx.org/mt/84188539/21656 Group Owner: [email protected] Unsubscribe: https://lists.spdx.org/g/Spdx-tech/unsub [[email protected]] -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
