[charter] Addressable Ranges?

Hi, folks–

I'd like to ask for feedback on the notion of adding "addressable 
ranges" to the WebApps WG charter.

There are a set of use cases for being able to link to a specific 
passage of text in a document, which has a number of what I consider 
hard problems:
* the passage might cross element boundaries
* someone linking into the document usually doesn't have write access to 
the document such that they can insert permanent markers into the text
* documents might change: the passage may have moved, been slightly 
altered, or even been completely removed
* many other considerations (including single-page vs. multi-page 
versions of the same document, near-duplicates of the document at 
different URLs, etc.)

I bring this to the WebApps WG for a couple reasons:
* there are related deliverables and discussions already underway, 
including the new Selections API work from Niwa, the Clipboard API work, 
and the discussions around a Find API
* if this is ever going to happen, this is the right community of 
developers and browser vendors to discuss the different challenges and 
possibilities

This work might take a while before we consider it ready for serious 
consideration for implementation and deployment in browsers, but I'd 
like to start the conversation now so we can keep this in mind while 
developing related features, and build toward some tangible outcome in 
the not-too-distant future.

Because finding a solution to this would be a major goal of the proposed 
Web Annotations WG, it would be nice if this could be a joint 
deliverable of both groups. While we propose to have the conversation on 
public-webapps (for the widest and most critical review), the Web 
Annotations WG will provide an Editor and a Test Lead, and we would 
prefer to have a co-Editor from WebApps.

Regards-
-Doug

Received on Friday, 18 April 2014 19:45:41 UTC