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Is it possible that the <section> tag for a topic could automatically have an id inserted into it by Skynet in the form of <section id="TopicID1234"> where 1234 is the topic ID number? This will provide a stable xref linkend to a given topic no matter where it gets used.
A consideration: using the topic ID as an xml element id works when there is only one instance of the topic in the output namespace (like a website or topic cloud), but doesn't work when more than one instance of a topic can exist in the output namespace (like a "book") ref: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=767000
Topics can be listed multiple times in a book, so there will never be any such thing as a "fixed id". Currently the topic title is used as the basis for the ID, but this is not guaranteed to be stable. xrefs should not be used anyway - all links between topics should be handled by the CSP or other processor.