Re: Maybe it's time to change CFI syntax to support CSS Selector?

Good point. But, as you say, It's a very good starting point indeed 🙂
No need to reengineer the wheel just for the fun of it 😉

Cheers,
Lars

On Thu, 17 Feb 2022, 08:25 Ivan Herman, <ivan@w3.org> wrote:

>
>
> On 17 Feb 2022, at 07:33, Lars Wallin <lars@colibrio.com> wrote:
>
> Hey Xu Zheng 👋
>
> There is actually already a standard for this. Have a look at the Web
> Annotation Selectors and States document
>
> https://www.w3.org/TR/selectors-states/#CssSelector_def
>
> https://www.w3.org/TR/selectors-states/#serializing-iri-to-url
>
>
> Just to be precise here…. the selector part *is* indeed a standard
> (defined formally in [1]) and just quoted in the note that you cite. But
> the URI translation thereof[2] is not.
>
> (I am all in favor of reusing the model, of course, if we can. But we
> should be careful with the expectations…)
>
> Ivan
>
>
> [1] https://www.w3.org/TR/annotation-model/
> [2] https://www.w3.org/TR/selectors-states/#frags
>
>
>
> Let's show the Web Annotations spec the love it deserves 🙂
>
> As EPUBCFI supports "extensions" which would let you tag these selectors
> on to the CFI, making it EPUB compatible 👌
>
> http://idpf.org/epub/linking/cfi/epub-cfi.html#sec-extensions
>
> Cheers,
> Lars
>
> On Thu, 17 Feb 2022, 03:37 Xu Zheng (gardenia), <zxu@gardenia-corp.com>
> wrote:
>
>> Hi folks
>>
>> This week POC (
>> https://wysebee.com/?startSelector=%23home-header%3A0%3A8&endSelector=%23home-header%3A0%3A15)
>> to select a random string in web browser bring me back to one question
>> again.
>>
>> "Can we change CFI spec a bit to support CSS Selector"?
>>
>>
>> As a reading system programmer the most difficult part to implement CFI
>> for highlight are:
>> 1. need to go through all element to identify element for CFI such as
>> following
>>
>> /6/4!/4/10/2/1
>>
>> 2. when we have this CFI generated for highlight then it's still
>> difficult to go through DOM to locate this element when rendering highlight.
>>
>>
>> I went through CSS selector again as well it is possible to use CSS
>> selector to locate every element (for example implementation like this
>> https://www.npmjs.com/package/css-selector-generator).
>>
>> And actually I remember when someone had brought up CFI to CSS WG and Web
>> browser vendor a few years ago mostly two questions raised from them:
>>
>> 1. why don't use CSS selector
>>
>> 2. should avoid inventing new way attaching to URI such as following
>>
>> #epubcfi(/6/4!/4/10/2/1:3[%d0%a4-%22spa%20ce%22-99%25-aa^[bb^]^^])
>>
>>
>>
>> The rest of CFI I think are very useful by defining charOffset of each
>> text node and the node index of the target node which are not covered by
>> CSS Selector (you might want to ask - can we ask CSS Selector to support
>> selecting charOffset? I am not sure since CSS Selector seems only select
>> element (https://www.w3.org/TR/selectors-4/#context) ).
>>
>>
>> So I wonder, maybe we still can find a unified way to define annotation
>> but with slightly changed CFI.
>>
>>
>> In the POC I tried format like
>>
>> ?startSelector=<CSS Selector>:<node index>:<charOffset>&endSelector=<CSS
>> Selector>:<node index>:<charOffset>
>>
>> But if make it more closer to "CFI" we might have something like this? So
>> even if web browser might not support it natively but as long as epub could
>> support then we can have something unified that end user could share
>> highlight in the same book but different reading app.
>>
>> ?epubcfi=<CSS Selector>:<node index>:<charOffset>,<CSS Selector>:<node
>> index>:<charOffset>
>>
>>
>> And this format can satisfy "path-relative-scheme-less-URL string
>> <https://url.spec.whatwg.org/#path-relative-scheme-less-url-string>"
>>
>>
>> Cheers,
>>
>> --
>> Zheng Xu
>>
>> Chief Executive Officer
>> Gardenia Corphttps://gardenia-corp.com/
>>
>>
>
> ----
> Ivan Herman, W3C
> Home: http://www.w3.org/People/Ivan/
> mobile: +33 6 52 46 00 43
>
>
>