[Bug 5744] Improved Fragment Identifiers

http://www.w3.org/Bugs/Public/show_bug.cgi?id=5744





--- Comment #19 from Erik Wilde <dret@berkeley.edu>  2008-06-15 02:45:54 ---
(In reply to comment #18)
> I don't think I've ever seen anyone point to an arbitrary paragraph or page in
> a PDF. Do you have an example of a page doing that?

other than me doing it i cannot point to one from the top of my head, and what
people probably do much more often is use a pdf and point to it and then say in
plain text "read page 42". that i am seeing all the time, but i don't have
statistics on it.

> I recommend reading:
> http://wiki.whatwg.org/wiki/FAQ#Is_there_a_process_for_adding_new_features_to_the_spec.3F

i did read that. it starts with use cases. this is what i am trying to do here.

> We have to show a need, and show a desire to implement, before we can really
> come up with a proposal. Just saying that there is "clearly a need" isn't data
> showing a need. So far the only evidence I've seen presented that there is a
> need here is a working group that tried to address the issue and apparently
> gave up, and a Firefox extension whose name comes up with under a hundred hits
> on Google. This is not exactly a resounding base of support.

xpointer was not finished because the xml linking group stopped working, and
that happened because xml took off as a back-end format, and not in the way
expected by the w3c originally: as a format directly used by browsers. this is
not any proof that users and browsers could not benefit from better fragment
identification, it only shows that xml did not take off as the user-facing
format it was expected to become.

i am wondering, though, why you are not addressing my argument that fragment
identification inherently needs cooperating peers, so if you ask for proof
where people are fixing the problem on their end (as you can do it with stuff
that can be fixed with scripting by page authors missing html language
features), more or less by definition it will be impossible to come up with
anything that is likely to satisfy you.


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Received on Sunday, 15 June 2008 02:46:28 UTC