Current Situation

a <draw:page> element has the following attributes

"draw:id" defined as a unique id for drawing pages. In OpenOffice.org (OOo), this was never used prior to OOo 2.3. It is currently only used for redundant slide transition information.

"draw:name" defined as an optional but unique name. OOo either writes a programmatic name ("page1", "page2", etc) or a user defined one, which can contain white space. In the xml format it is used for links referring to slides inside a document and also when defining a custom show. This has the consequence that such links break if the user renames the slide.

a shape element has the following attributes

"draw:id" defined as a unique id for shapes. This is used to identify shapes for animation effects.

"draw:name" is an optional attribute. It is not documented if this has to be unique. In the OOo implementation, shape names are enforced to be unique but only for shapes on one slide. For historical reasons this is also used for links to shapes in OOo. This feature breaks if there are multiple shapes with the same name on different slides.

In addition a shape has the elements <svg:title> and <svg:description> to specify text-only description strings for graphical objects as specified in §5.4 of [SVG]. This was a A11Y requirement.

Request for non unique page names

The initial request was that the name of a page should not be enforced to be unique. To be consisted and to fulfill A11Y requirements the <draw:page> element must also have the elements <svg:title> and <svg:description>. In this context the title could be seen as the display name as proposed in solution B. For backward compatibility, if no title is given then the name must be used. On the user interface the title must become what the user normally refers to as the name of the page.

A new request would be to prepare a conform way to identify pages and shape elements inside an odf document. To enable linking to meta information we must have the xml:id attribute for pages (and optionally for shapes). This would lead to the situation where we have the xml:id, the draw:id and the draw:name documented as kind of identifiers for pages (and shapes). To have a clean format I propose to add xml:id to both draw:page and all shape elements. It will be document that draw:id attribute is deprecated and that applications must for now export the draw:id attribute with the same value as the xml:id element. The attribute draw:id should be removed in a later version as soon as there is no more demand for backward compatibility.