- From: Erik Wilde <dret@berkeley.edu>
- Date: Mon, 09 Jun 2008 15:07:15 -0700
- To: public-html@w3.org
- CC: Anne van Kesteren <annevk@opera.com>
hello anne. thanks for your response. > To me it seems like a solution looking for a problem. If I want to point > someone to a quote in a document I typically extract the quote (copy and > paste) and hand that over plus the URL so they can figure out the > context (using inline find or manual scanning). This works quite well > and even has the advantage that you don't necessarily need to retrieve > the resource. that's what everybody has to do because of a lack of a better way of doing it. using fragment identifiers certainly has a certain aura of doing something obscure, but i think it is the better way of pointing to something. if you extract, you loose context and people have to re-establish context by searching. if you point to a fragment, people can look at the content directly within its context. this of course depends on tool support, the usual chicken-and-egg situation. i think html5 would be in a good position to lay a really good egg here ;-) but i am sure there are many more people with the "solution without a problem" attitude. i guess my main motivation is that my personal background is in document processing and hypertext, and i always like ideas that try to turn the web into a better hypertext system. > Besides that, apart from dated W3C TR/ URLs resources on the Web > frequently change so a simple pointer to the third paragraph in a > document becomes very ambigious over time. (To be fair, this is also > true to a certain extent for URLs and the fragment identifiers we have > today, but less so, I think.) yes. all pointers on the web are transient (unless the URI provider has a very strict persistence policy), and fragment identifiers certainly more so than plain URIs. but i don't think this is an argument against the proposal, it is a general observation of the nature of the web. cheers, dret.
Received on Monday, 9 June 2008 22:08:30 UTC