# Proposal: Make style ids immutable

**URL:** <https://discourse.citationstyles.org/t/proposal-make-style-ids-immutable/1478>\
**Category:** CSL Development\
**Created:** [August 9, 2018, 7:00pm UTC](https://discourse.citationstyles.org/t/proposal-make-style-ids-immutable/1478 "2018-08-09T19:00:49Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Showing post:** 5

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**Author:** ![Dan\_Stillman](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/ecb155/32.png) [@Dan\_Stillman](https://discourse.citationstyles.org/u/Dan_Stillman)\
**Post date:** [November 9, 2019, 7:35am UTC](https://discourse.citationstyles.org/t/proposal-make-style-ids-immutable/1478/5 "2019-11-09T07:35:36Z")

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Following up on this, given [recent discussion](https://discourse.citationstyles.org/t/naming-scheme-for-note-styles/1575/4) of adding a `<uuid>` field to solve the problem of ids that get changed.

Above, I proposed simply freezing existing ids and using UUIDs for new ones, and updating the spec to clarify that the `id` field is an opaque string rather than a URI.

Adding a `<uuid>` field has some advantages:

- People creating new styles wouldn’t be confused by seeing two different `<id>` formats in existing styles and not know which to use.

- Implementations that treat the id as anything other than an opaque string now might behave unexpectedly if UUIDs started appearing in `<id>`. Hopefully most such code is resilient enough to handle unexpected values when, say, deriving a filename from the id (e.g., to simply use the full string + `.csl` if there are no slashes, which it should, because technically “a URI” could also mean a URN), but it’s not impossible that there could be unexpected behavior.

But there are also some downsides to having two fields:

- We’d have to update every single style. That’s easily automated, but it would mean a ton of churn and a loss of meaningful last-update times.

- Authors would have to populate two id fields in new styles, which would continue the confusion about what exactly was supposed to go in `<id>`.

- Implementations would still need to deal with styles without UUIDs as long as they supported older CSL formats, which would mean continuing to treat `<id>` as an identifier of some sort. (That could create some weird situations if, say, you installed an old version of the APA style with just an id but had a newer version with both the same id and also a UUID. Are those two styles treated as equivalent, because the id is the same, or is an id in a UUID-less style treated as the same sort of opaque identifier as a UUID and therefore treated as a different style?) This would be more complicated than just making sure `<id>` was treated as an opaque string.

- I’m not sure we would ever actually want to remove `<id>`, because if we did then anyone who still had a pre-UUID style and installed a newer version without an id would end up with a totally separate style. So we’d likely end up keeping this superfluous, confusing field forever.

So while I understand the appeal of transitioning to a new, consistent format, for simplicity I’d probably stick to a single field that was simply defined as opaque.

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_[View the full topic](https://discourse.citationstyles.org/t/proposal-make-style-ids-immutable/1478)._