Re: Using XPointer with HTML

"Masayasu Ishikawa" <mimasa@w3.org>
> [ Caveat: this is my personal opinion, not representing the HTML WG ]
>
> "Jim Ley" <jim@jibbering.com> wrote:
>
> > So no matter about HTML documents, XHTML ones can't be annotated
either?
> > (RFC 3236 defines application/xhtml+xml )
>
> So long as you use 'text/html', no.  For XHTML documents served as
> 'application/xhtml+xml', "3. Fragment identifiers" of RFC 3236 says
> as follows:
>
>    At the time of writing, [XMLMIME] does not define syntax and
>    semantics of fragment identifiers, but refers to "XML Pointer
>    Language (XPointer)" for a future XML fragment identification
>    mechanism. The current specification for XPointer is available at
>    http://www.w3.org/TR/xptr.

Which does not list 'application/xhtml+xml' as one of the mime-types
covered...

"XPointer is defined to be the fragment identifier language only for
resources whose media type is one of text/xml, application/xml,
text/xml-external-parsed-entity, or
application/xml-external-parsed-entity"

"Schemes (discussed in 4.3 Schemes ) can be used to provide specialized
addressing into the content of resources of  [IETF RFC 3023] media types.
"

If I read this as per one of the arguments advanced for not being
applicable to text/html - then it's equally not applicable to
application/xhtml+xml, and another scheme name should be used.  If that's
wrong and it's perfectly okay to use xpointer with application/xhtml+xml,
then the argument that it can't be used with text/html is also weakened.

> > The question is not how does XPointer into HTML compare to XPointer
into
> > XHTML, but can we point to something in an HTML document?
>
> "It depends".

That is not an answer, and relating HTML to XHTML is wholly irrelevant to
the discussion, as you're only pointing to one document (which is
ludicrous anyway as we're pointing to resources not documents) with any
one xpointer so what would happen in a different document isn't relevant.

Jim.

Received on Wednesday, 3 April 2002 11:53:37 UTC