RE: [xliff] IDs - uniqueness for inline only within segments (A)

[Yves Savourel <ysavourel@enlaso.com>]

Hi Tom,

Thanks for the well thought points.

One of the main reason why can't use simple xs:ID values is because one can move <file> elements into different documents. So you
could end up having ID clash after grouping the <files> elements of several documents into a single one for example.

So the only way we could use xs:ID for the id attribute type would be to use globally unique IDs. That would fit the constraints of
xs:ID, and that would allow manipulating the <file> any way we want too. But using GUIDs comes with problems too:

As you noted, the problem with xs:ID would then be that you obviously cannot have them both in <source> and <target>. Your solution
then would be to use xs:IDREF in the <target>. But then you can have extra inline elements in target, so those won't point to
anything in <source> and can't be IDREFs.

In addition, we do a lot of things with inline codes IDs (outside of XLIFF), and GUIDs are not helpful in many cases. For example.
When leveraging from a TM the IDs are used to map the inline code of new source to the inline codes of the old translation. GUIDs
will prevent that.

And just from a usability viewpoint: GUIDs are going to look like this: id="550e8400-e29b-41d4-a716-446655440000". Doing any kind of
inline code manipulation or reading error reports will quickly become very hard for humans. I don't want to imagine the mess in a
XLIFF document with an RTF layer. The simpler the inline codes are the better.

Another challenge: how would we validate that the id values are true GUIDs?

In short: I'm not against xs:ID, but to use that type the values would have to be GUIDs, and, in my opinion, it is not truly
practical.

I think, while it'd be nice to use XML's at its fullest, we have to remember that XLIFF is just a serialization of objects not
necessarily meant to be used with XML tools. We shouldn't try to force data like ID values to an XML specific kind because it's more
convenient.

Cheers,
-ys