Re: Another pseudo-element gotcha

Nothing wrong with tree walking by number if you're pointing into
a stable text (a testament), or you really want to know what
chapter four is right now.  "Stuff on the Web" can be anything,
and will become more diverse.

Regards, Terry

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From: Peter Flynn <pflynn@curia.ucc.ie>
Subject: Re: Another pseudo-element gotcha
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At 07:49 14/04/97 -0700, Tim Bray wrote:

>Anyone who uses tree-walking-by-number-alone to point to stuff on the
>Web has rocks in their head.  It may be possible occasionally, to
>count typed nodes (e.g. the fourth chapter), but just counting nodes,
>or levels in the tree, is guaranteed, I repeat guaranteed, to fail,
>in a high proportion of cases. 

Emperor's new clothes. I always wondered how it was supposed to work when
so many documents are either dynamically constructed, or in a constant
state of revision. I tend to put IDs on all the things I think people might
want to point at, but that's pretty one-sided too. A combination of regexp
and proximity and element-sensitive searching would help:

id(pubs)foreign(findme beer near pretzel within element ITEM)

///Peter

Received on Monday, 14 April 1997 13:19:32 UTC