[Bug 5744] Improved Fragment Identifiers

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





--- Comment #20 from Ian 'Hixie' Hickson <ian@hixie.ch>  2008-06-15 03:26:43 ---
> [...] use a pdf and point to it and then say in plain text "read page 42".

Sure, but that's the same thing as people saying "look at this page and read
the section numbered 3.4", which happens a lot even when the page in question
has IDs and thus wouldn't need it (i.e. when fragment identifiers would be
enough). (This actually suggests a technical solution might not be useful
here.)


> i am wondering, though, why you are not addressing my argument that fragment
> identification inherently needs cooperating peers

There are plenty of examples where problems that need cooperating peers have
still flourished. At the extreme we have Flash, where a single vendor decided
there was a problem space (animations, videos) to fill, and filled it, with
insane penetration numbers. Similarly with MathML, where some authors are using
it even though most clients don't support it -- there are plugins that provide
it.

The problem could also be worked around from the other side. For example, if
this was a need that many users had, I would expect CMS tools like WordPress to
automatically assign IDs to every paragraph and "br" element. I know of a few
people who go out of their way to do this (I have done it in the past myself),
but they are all theoreticians, people who understand the benefits we could
derive from this, if only people cared enough to use it.

One can imagine many ways that people might have worked around the lack of this
feature. But in practice, they haven't, at least not insofar as I have seen. I
don't disagree that the idea is a good one, and that (assuming we could resolve
the brittleness issue) it would have huge potential to those who used it, but
we can't just go around solving problems we like. We have to focus on the
problems that people are actually running into. We don't have infinite
resources, and our resources are likely better spent on more important things,
like video, like maths, like duplex long-term connections.


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Received on Sunday, 15 June 2008 03:27:19 UTC