On 9/8/06, Bèr Kessels <ber@webschuur.com> wrote:
The problem lies deeper. We abuse titles for several things: 1 Unique, or semi-unique identifiers in the admin areas (node overviews, etc)
1 has absolutely nothing to do with the metadata "title", allthough in a lot of cases/sites it may be a good idea to use the title for this.
Yep, we do basically use titles as 'unique identifiers' in many places, and with good reason too: 'title' is the only field, apart from 'nid', that can even be considered unique! Therefore, it is the only human-friendly identifier for nodes. I agree that titles, whether explicitly specifed or whether pattern-generated, should be required and should be unique. My importexportapi module, for example, treats the 'title' field as required and as unique, because it is the only field suitable for being an 'alternate key' for nid (i.e. a reliable but more human-friendly identifier, that can be used instead of nid).This is just one more case where having guaranteed unique titles is very useful. Cheers, Jaza.