I'm sorry, I'm not following and I don't want to be a blocker.  Also, I don't think I'm explaining myself correctly but I also don't want to beat a dead horse.

We're probably talking about two very different and orthogonal use cases. Perhaps your proposal should be a separate pull request and this one can be closed out since what I'm talking about is probably better described as a "name" instead of an "id"?

Backbone.Siren relies on sub-enitties having a `name` and with a couple of applications using Siren + Backbone.Siren in production I must be missing something because I don't see how you can have a client without entities having a name.  It could be that id's make sense from a server side implementation, whereas I'm looking at this more from a consumer point of view?  I dunno :P, @kevinswiber maybe we can chat offline at some point and you can help me out.  Eventually, I'll either see the light and realize that names aren't useful or I'll figure out how to better communicate their effectiveness at which point I can open a new pull request.