Yeah, a mixture of implicit and explicit IDs is fine and what everyone does in one form or another. That's what I had in mind as the 99% solution. You don't want the default implicit ID scheme to be too clever or opaque so the programmer can easily diagnose what went wrong when it inevitably does. I was just cautioning against relying too much on ever fancier implicit schemes because of those failure modes; I went down that path a few times when I first started experimenting with immediate-mode UIs years ago.