[wp-trac] [WordPress Trac] #44883: Twenty Seventeen: Use simple counter rather than uniqid() for generating unique IDs for HTML elements

[WordPress Trac]

#44883: Twenty Seventeen: Use simple counter rather than uniqid() for generating
unique IDs for HTML elements
---------------------------+--------------------
 Reporter:  westonruter    |      Owner:  (none)
     Type:  enhancement    |     Status:  new
 Priority:  normal         |  Milestone:  4.9.9
Component:  Bundled Theme  |    Version:  4.7
 Severity:  normal         |   Keywords:
  Focuses:                 |
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 The Twenty Seventeen theme uses `uniqid()` in `twentyseventeen_get_svg()`
 and `searchform.php` in order to generate a unique IDs for HTML elements.
 While this works, it is somewhat overkill: the `uniqid()` generates a
 random number to be used (e.g. `search-form-5b8cb8ffd2f29`), whereas all
 that Twenty Seventeen needs is a function that returns an integer which is
 incremented with each call (e.g. `search-form-1`). In Underscore and
 Lodash there is a `_.uniqueId()` function which does just this. Not only
 is it less computationally expensive, but it also has a key advantage for
 a caching purpose.

 For example, the [https://github.com/Automattic/amp-wp AMP plugin] has a
 post-processor which takes the output-buffered template rendered from
 WordPress and loads it into a DOM document for post-processing to ensure
 HTML elements are converted into their AMPHTML equivalents, in addition to
 making sure that there is no markup left in the response that is not valid
 AMP. To speed up this post-processor step, once it has finished post-
 processing the plugin computes an MD5 hash or the resulting HTML from the
 serialized DOM, and stores it in the object cache with the hash as the
 key. The next time that the post processor is about to run it first checks
 to see if it has already post-processed the HTML in the current response,
 and if so, it can short-circuit with the cached output. This is not
 possible in Twenty Seventeen, however, because the generated HTML is
 different for every single time that WordPress generates a template. This
 causes an additional problem for the plugin because it results in a 100%
 cache miss rate. See GitHub [https://github.com/Automattic/amp-
 wp/issues/1239 issue] and [https://github.com/Automattic/amp-wp/pull/1325
 PR] where the plugin now detects for high cache miss rate and turns off
 the post processor cache when it happens.

 But all of this could be avoided if Twenty Seventeen just used a more
 appropriate function for generating unique HTML IDs.

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Ticket URL: <https://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/44883>
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