<div class="gmail_quote">On Thu, Jun 23, 2011 at 20:53, Simon Prosser <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:pross@pross.org.uk">pross@pross.org.uk</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex;">
I got a tweet from Chip asking for theme-check to flag it as bad, so ..<div><br></div><div>Are people not supposed to use it at all? if so theme fails? and if so what is the suggested alternative?<br><br></div></blockquote>
<div><br></div><div><div>You should *never*, *ever* use the guid in your theme. It is (meant to be) a globally unique identifier for RSS readers. </div><div><br></div><div>RSS readers use the GUID to know which posts are newly published, so they don't retrieve the same content over and over. </div>
<div><br></div><div>It is not a permalink (even though it looks like one) and could just as well be a random string of hexadecimal characters. In fact that's one of the current suggestions on how to make sure they really are unique: due to inconsistencies in behaviour over the years the current ones are not necessarily unique, and of course people change them all the time -- *holds up guilty hand*.</div>
</div><div><br></div><div>So any code that references or outputs the guid is "doing it wrong"</div><div><br></div><div>Mike</div><div><br></div></div>-- <br>Mike Little<div><a href="http://zed1.com/" target="_blank">http://zed1.com/</a></div>
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