- From: John Cowan <cowan@mercury.ccil.org>
- Date: Mon, 21 Apr 2003 09:22:01 -0400
- To: Larry Masinter <LMM@acm.org>
- Cc: uri@w3.org
Larry Masinter scripsit:
> 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`).
I like that use of backquotes in plain text for incorporating something by
reference!
Diff format works for patches because there is no real need for pointers:
adding highly verbose context (one or more lines) is only a small cost
compared to the new content itself. Here we are trying to capture a
location in a document that will fit into reasonable expectations about
the size of URI references. Regular expressions are well-supported by
libraries almost everywhere, and can be much more condensed than context
lines.
> 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.
The basic advantage of character counts is that they are fast to
compute and fast to reference, and would be handy for pointing into
documents like RFCs that are truly and forever frozen.
--
After fixing the Y2K bug in an application: John Cowan
WELCOME TO <censored> jcowan@reutershealth.com
DATE: MONDAK, JANUARK 1, 1900 http://www.ccil.org/~cowan
Received on Monday, 21 April 2003 09:22:19 UTC