Re: Using XPointer with HTML

"Steven Pemberton" <steven.pemberton@cwi.nl>
> > All you need to do is be
> > able to indentify elements in the parse tree, XPointer like syntax is
> > good for this, especially if the document has id's.
>
> If the document has id's then you can just use a URI, problem solved.
But I
> thought a more general solution was being sought.

Having id's makes pointing to a child of an element with an id or a range
within elements with id's more reliable, obviously if you're pointing to
just an id it's trivial as you say.

> > Well of course you would, they're different documents!
>
> No, the same document, served with different media types. It is the
same
> document, but the result of the media types means it gets parsed
> differently.

Can you have an xhtml1.1 document that is served as text/html ?  If not
the point is of somewhat historical interest as we're talking about a
subset of xhtml 1.0 documents are we not?

> > However if the Pointer is
> > xpointer(id('Moomin')) then it will happily point to the same element
> > within the Resource (assuming the resources are appropriately
authored,
> > and content negotiation on the document returned from the URI is
> > logical.)
>
> As I said, if the document has ids, the problem is solved.

No it is not, by your argument
http://jibbering.example/example#xpointer(id('Moomin')) points to a
different fragment depending on whether the resource has an xhtml or html
mime-type.

> > This seems very confused to me, in one part you define xpointer to
only
> > work with the idea that a URI returns a particular document (not a
> > particular resource) and now you argue against xpointers in HTML
> > documents by comparing them with XHTML - the differences betwenn
XHTML
> > and HTML are irrelevant to the purposes of XPointers in HTML - in
HTML,
> > we know there's a TBODY in the parse tree, in an XHTML document we
know
> > there's not unless it's in the source document.  Those differences
are
> > irrelevant to whether you can point to a particular part of an HTML
parse
> > tree.
> >
> > The question is not how does XPointer into HTML compare to XPointer
into
> > XHTML, but can we point to something in an HTML document?
>
> I'm sorry if I said something that upset you. I don't know what I said
to
> engender such rancour.

You've said nothing to upset me - but your confused arguments over
XPointer and HTML have left more questions (many of which have been
raised before, and gone un-answered) than answers - A large number of
comments on XPointers have arisen in the thread, perhaps rather than
limit yourself to commenting on XPointer into HTML and the context of
TBODY you could comment on all the issues raised - those are the ones
that are actually concerning www-annotation and wai-er after all.

Jim.

Received on Wednesday, 10 April 2002 07:33:41 UTC