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Bug 14465 - If itemid is a unique identifier, then should the Microdata DOM API include a method for retrieving a Node by itemid, similar to GetElementById()?
Summary: If itemid is a unique identifier, then should the Microdata DOM API include a...
Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX
Alias: None
Product: HTML WG
Classification: Unclassified
Component: HTML Microdata (editor: Ian Hickson) (show other bugs)
Version: unspecified
Hardware: Other other
: P3 normal
Target Milestone: ---
Assignee: Ian 'Hixie' Hickson
QA Contact: HTML WG Bugzilla archive list
URL: http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/...
Whiteboard:
Keywords:
: 14466 (view as bug list)
Depends on:
Blocks:
 
Reported: 2011-10-14 16:28 UTC by contributor
Modified: 2011-10-14 18:16 UTC (History)
5 users (show)

See Also:

Attachments

Description contributor 2011-10-14 16:28:48 UTC 
Specification: http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/multipage/microdata.html
Multipage: http://www.whatwg.org/C#microdata-dom-api
Complete: http://www.whatwg.org/c#microdata-dom-api

Comment:
If itemid is a unique identifier, then should the Microdata DOM API include a
method for retrieving a Node by itemid, similar to GetElementById()?

Posted from: 75.189.240.28
User agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_7_2) AppleWebKit/535.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/14.0.835.202 Safari/535.1
Comment 1 Tab Atkins Jr. 2011-10-14 16:41:55 UTC 
No, the thing being uniquely identified by @itemid is not the Microdata item, but rather whatever the Microdata item's properties are talking about.  For example, the @itemid may be pointing to an isbn: url, which uniquely identifies a particular edition of a book.  

It is perfectly fine to have multiple Microdata items with the same @itemid on a single page - they're just each defining properties for the same unique item.
Comment 2 Tab Atkins Jr. 2011-10-14 16:42:14 UTC 
*** Bug 14466 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
Comment 3 Ian 'Hixie' Hickson 2011-10-14 18:16:48 UTC 
EDITOR'S RESPONSE: This is an Editor's Response to your comment. If you are satisfied with this response, please change the state of this bug to CLOSED. If you have additional information and would like the editor to reconsider, please reopen this bug. If you would like to escalate the issue to the full HTML Working Group, please add the TrackerRequest keyword to this bug, and suggest title and text for the tracker issue; or you may create a tracker issue yourself, if you are able to do so. For more details, see this document:
   http://dev.w3.org/html5/decision-policy/decision-policy.html

Status: Rejected
Change Description: no spec change
Rationale: see comment 1 for why we don't have this today. We might add this in the future if there's a good use case, but it seems likely that most such use cases are adequately handled just by using id="".