XML Companion, The, Third Edition

Link value strategies

For many purposes, unique identifiers can be generated automatically by software, and references can also be inserted automatically. But issues arise when unique identifiers, or just the references to them, must be created by hand. In such cases, the scheme chosen for assigning identifiers must be convenient for authors to use.

Sequential assignment

One approach is to use simple code numbers. If the last element likely to be the target of a reference was assigned an identifier of 'X-77776' (recall that identifiers cannot start with a digit), then the next element is assigned an identifier of 'X-77777'.

These identifiers may be inserted automatically by editorial or database software. But, because the identifiers are not ...