Reply To: Unique ids

[Derek Read]

We merely set up the defaults for which elements to auto-id in order to facilitate reuse or linking to elements that we think are likely to be used for those purposes. The elements that were chosen were based on some early surveys we performed. Knowing that different people will need more / fewer elements to have id values automatically set is why the interface for choosing those elements is provided in Tools > DITA Options.

So, if you don't reference elements (either for conref/reuse or cross referencing) then of course you don't need any id values at all, except the topic's root. You need an @id on the root for the document to be valid because in the DITA DTDs the @id for the root element in each topic type is defined as a true ID and #REQUIRED whereas all of the other @id are CDATA and #IMPLIED.

If you do need @id on some elements but prefer to manually set them to nice values then maybe in your case you should disable auto-id for everything except , and .

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