Re: Linking to part of a resource

On 1/3/06, Robin Berjon <robin.berjon@expway.fr> wrote:
> On Jan 03, 2006, at 12:21, Sylvain Hellegouarch wrote:
> > I hope you all had a very nice holiday break (assuming you had
> > one ;)).
> > It might be offtopic but do you feel this [1] is something the WEB-
> > API group  could (should) address?
> > [1]http://channelxml.com/community/blogs/sylvain/archive/
> > 2006/01/03/11.aspx
>
> I think this is well outside the scope of the Web APIs WG.
> Programmatically, what you describe can be done using DOM Ranges, but
> I'm not sure that would help in the linking case since it is largely
> declarative. The framework with which to implement such functionality
> is XPointer. I seem to recall Mozilla actually supporting something
> like this at some point by precise memory evades me. One problem with
> such links is that even if you try to make them more robust (e.g. by
> using XPath and regexen instead of just character offsets) they're
> still quite brittle since a very simple change to the target page
> could completely throw off your link.

This is something the WAI ER WG have been looking at, who's use case
is even more complicated as it's built on being able to point to
things with some reliability in invalid DOM's not just valid ones. 
Combination methods including an HTMLPointer (which is similar to an
XPointer but is over a defined set of elements e.g. ignore TBODY's)
and a set of metrics on sites allowed for a reasonably reliable and
interopable method.  Unfortunately the individual with action items
relating to this is a lazy muppet and only minimal things are written
up in a digestable manner, I think he goes by the name Jim Ley.

public-wai-ert@w3.org is the mailing list for the group, if you search
the archives for htmlpointer you'll certainly turn up some discussion.

Cheers,

Jim.

Received on Tuesday, 3 January 2006 14:43:40 UTC