Just renaming is trivial, what is more difficult is updating all references that reference this element. But this is all doable in an extension, I think.

i would definitely like to know more about how to go about doing this ..

...

another thing that would be handy is 're-order group', where a group is selected, and you can re-order the name of the elements ("id=" tag) automatically..

I'm not sure how reordering is related to names. Can you give an example?

well, lets say i've got 16 rects. i want them to be renamed to all be the 'same name, plus a number' .. so "rect-00", "rect-01", etc. i want the 'order' of the number in the name to be related to the order which they were selected, so i could manually select them, and have them be 'ordered' by their name/#..

the reason this is handy for me (and maybe other inkscape users, i don't know) is that i'm using inkscape to produce SVG files for rendering different states of a user interface. one state would be where 'rect-00' is on, one would be where 'rect-01' is on, etc.

and, if this could be applied to groups (<g id="somegroup"> elements) as well, it would be ultra-useful.

right now, i'm running all my SVG files through a custom pySVG script after inkscape editing, but this is proving to be painful, and far too finicky. it'd be great if i could just rename/order id's in inkscape, the same way that Canvas or Illustrator do it ..