[wp-hackers] De-emphasize use of ID values in functions?

[Otto]

Somebody on the forums brought up a good point today. A lot of the
functions are still very geared towards use of ID numbers. Post IDs,
category IDs, etc.

However, WordPress itself moved away from that a bit in 2.5, with the
removal of the ID numbers from the admin space.

Any plans/ideas/thoughts about making these functions geared more
towards names/slugs? I mean, the functions using IDs must be meant for
the end-user to do theme modification, because generic theme
developers won't know the individual IDs on the sites using the
themes.

Another way to go would be to make it easier for theme developers to
provide administrative pages (theme options) to allow for people to
choose posts/pages/categories/whatever and then produce the ID's to
plug into the proper places on the themes. I like this idea, but am
not as certain about the right way to do this sort of thing, or what
sort of functions would help theme developers in this respect.

-Otto