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Old 03-27-2009, 02:57 PM   #30
Peter Sorotokin
speaking for myself
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Join Date: Feb 2008
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Quote:
Originally Posted by kovidgoyal View Post
1) The philosophical issue of whether trying to assign a unique id to electronic documents is meaningful. On this I strongly believe it is not. A consequence of that is that I believe a statement like "producing books with non unique ids is catastrophic" is just wrong.
Kovid,

while I understand at to some extent share your position on uniqueness of the identifier, the standard clearly requires a globally unique id:

Quote:
2.1: Package Identity
The package element is the root element in an OPF Package Document; all other elements are nested within it.

The package element must specify a value for its unique-identifier attribute. The unique-identifier attribute's value specifies which Dublin Core identifier element, described in Section 2.2.10, provides the package's preferred, or primary, identifier. The OPF Package Document's author is responsible for choosing a primary identifier that is unique to one and only one particular package (i.e., the set of files referenced from the package document's manifest).

Notwithstanding the requirement for uniqueness, Reading Systems must not fail catastrophically if they encounter two distinct packages with the same purportedly unique primary identifier.
There are a lot of silly things in the standards, but if we all start to ignore them, the world entropy is only going to increase...
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