- From: Larry Masinter <LMM@acm.org>
- Date: Sat, 19 Apr 2003 10:25:18 -0700
- To: "'John Cowan'" <cowan@mercury.ccil.org>
- Cc: <uri@w3.org>, <net.dred@dred.net>
> There's a tradeoff between robustness and the ability to point into > frozen documents where the author has not politely scattered lots of > ids for you. That's why XPointer supports both ids and Xanadu-style > tumblers as the simple cases, along with the super-duper-XPath version > that isn't yet ready for prime time. I don't see what the tradeoff is, actually. The idea for pointing into 'frozen' documents without IDs is to supply context. This has been common practice in finding locations in plain text files for decades (`man patch`). The 'patch' command has been pretty reliable, in my experience, in figuring out where to apply a patch even when the original source file has been edited. So why shouldn't text/plain fragment identifiers employ some of the same mechanisms? A line number plus some bits of context would be useful; I don't see the use of character counts or general regular expressions, at least for the applications I can imagine. Larry -- http://larry.masinter.net
Received on Saturday, 19 April 2003 13:25:35 UTC