xinclude fails to use URI syntax for referring to resources?

Regarding...
  http://www.w3.org/TR/2003/WD-xinclude-20031110/

I'm sorry to say that I haven't read it in detail,
but I learned from a last call announcement that

"the optional fragment identifier has been removed from the href
attribute and is now specifiable
via a new xpointer attribute."

This seems to introduce a way of pointing from one
resource to another without using URI references.

This seems like a bad idea, from the perspective
of Web Architecture.

There's a principle that I'm working on in the TAG,
somewhere between

"A URI SHOULD be assigned to each resource that is intended to be
identified, shared, or described by reference."

  -- http://www.w3.org/TR/webarch/#identification

If a URI has been assigned to a resource, Web agents SHOULD refer to the
resource using the same URI, character for character.
  -- http://www.w3.org/TR/webarch/#identifiers-comparison

which is basically: to refer from one thing to
another in the Web, use URI reference syntax.

I suppose qnames introduce another sort of URI reference
syntax... but so long as they work like URI references,
i.e. they're just shorthand for URIs, I suppose they're
manageable.

Is this 'new xpointer attribute' a shorthand for
a full URI?

-- 
Dan Connolly, W3C http://www.w3.org/People/Connolly/