This is not formally of type ID (an XML NAME which must start with a letter and contain only letters, digits and .-_:). It is recommended that IDs start with a letter, and contain no punctuation or whitespace. The function generate-id() in XSLT will generate semantically void unique IDs.

It is difficult to ensure uniqueness when documents are merged. We suggest namespacing IDs, perhaps using the containing elements as the base. Thus mol3:a1 could be a useful unique ID. However this is still experimental.