[web-annotation] Is fixing the list of fragment identifiers a good idea?

iherman has just created a new issue for 
https://github.com/w3c/web-annotation:

== Is fixing the list of fragment identifiers a good idea? ==
I was re-reading the [fragment 
selector](http://www.w3.org/TR/annotation-model/#h4_fragment-selector)
 section in the model document; my reading is that the Recommendation 
would fix the fragment selectors that a conforming implementation can 
use.

I think this is a very bad idea. Fragment identifiers are defined all 
the time; by restricting the list to the fragment identifiers we know 
about at the time of publishing the specification we will incur the 
danger of being out of date very quickly and that would require 
updates of the Recommendation. At this moment we are already missing 
some on the list, like:

* fragment identifiers for CSV files, defined by rfc7111 (this is the 
open #26 issue on our issue list)
* fragment identifiers for EPUB files, called 
[CFI](http://www.idpf.org/epub/linking/cfi/epub-cfi.html)
* fragment identifiers for PDF, defined in the [PDF mime type 
registration](https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3778#section-3)

And these are only a few examples. Within W3C, actually, there is work
 on, eg., [Web packaging](http://www.w3.org/TR/web-packaging/) that 
may lead to new [fragment 
identifiers](http://www.w3.org/TR/web-packaging/#fragment-identifiers)
 defined for web packaging formats (and the publishing community *may*
 come up with alternative for this), and we ourselves may define 
separate fragment identifiers for the RangeFinder API (as a 
serialization thereof). On long term we will loose.

I believe it would be a much better approach to leave this open ended.
 We should accept fragment identifiers that are officially defined 
either directly as part of a media type specification (as the one for 
PDF above) or as separate RFC-s (like rfc7111). I am sure there is a 
list somewhere maintained by IETF to refer to.

See https://github.com/w3c/web-annotation/issues/40

Received on Thursday, 25 June 2015 11:02:22 UTC