I don't get this argument at all. If the ID comes from something like a SERIAL column, then yes, you can port those easily. I think every database system has s

I don't get this argument at all. If the ID comes from something like a SERIAL column, then yes, you can port those easily. I think every database system has something like SERIAL, as well as the ability to control an initial value, taking care of portability concerns. SERIAL has other problems, namely predictability, so another possibility is UUIDs. And those should be pretty portable too. I know DBMS UUID implementations are different from OS implementations, but the risk of collision should still be vanishingly small. And if you don't use IDs, then what's the choice? If the URI contains an article name then what about article names being changed? What about duplicate article names?