Re: [URN] URI documents -- "# fragment"

Al Gilman <asgilman@access.digex.net> wrote:
>to follow up on what John C. Mallery said:
>
>> Might be worth noting that #fragment is utterly bogus.  It is a
>> positional identifier and cannot be recycled for server-side
>> fragments because it has been consumed by legacy web
>> applications.
>
>I can't grok your claim.  The way I interpret current practice
>the 'fragment' is not positional at all but reference to a name
>in a namespace.  So the client positions the cursor at the start
>of the named item which is a text range in this kind of document.
>But the URL usage is namewise, not positionwise.

	It is positional for the URI syntax in the sense that
it must be the right-most field in a URI-reference, and the URI,
itself, is to the left of the delimiter.  You are thinking about
one type of fragment instruction which applies to text/html, but
there is another, for seeking a MAP element associated with a
client-side image map.  Nothing in the URL -> URI draft precludes
formulation of other instructions, and use of lists in the format:

	#name1=value1;name2=value2[;...]

although perhaps the fragment = *uric in Section 3 needs a statement
that '=' and ';' are reserved, homologous to that following the
query = *uric in Section 4.3.3.


	How about this:
	
	smtp:asgilman@access.digex.net#subject=Backward%20Compatibility

Hmm... Is that fragment an instruction to the client, the server, or both?
Or how about this:

	smtp:;to=asgilman@access.digex.net;subject=Backward%20Compatibility

That's a URI, and maybe some useful instruction could be added via a
fragment to make it a URI-reference. :)

	In any case, a fragment need not be an instruction concerning an
HTML/XML/SGML NAME -- but the first thing a parser must do is separate it
from the URI in a URI-reference (and then further separate components of
the URI, or invoke some resolver).

				Fote

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Received on Monday, 26 January 1998 19:01:55 UTC