fragment identifiers applied before entire content is retrieved

During the discussion of temporal fragment identifiers,
I've noted that some of the wording in RFC 2396 might
need some minor tweaking:

    When a URI reference is used to perform a retrieval action on the
    identified resource, the optional fragment identifier, separated
from
    the URI by a crosshatch ("#") character, consists of additional
    reference information to be interpreted by the user agent after the
    retrieval action has been successfully completed.  ....

The fragment identifier can be interpreted by the user agent
before "the retrieval action has been successfully completed"
but after it's been successfully initiated. For example,
in HTML pages, the browser can scroll to the identified
fragment as soon as it's been parsed, and not wait until
the _entire_ document has been retrieved.

Similarly, if you open a PDF file with a page identifier
   http://acroeng.adobe.com/BrowserTestSuite/auxurl/auxurl_testpage.html
it doesn't need to download the entire file before it can turn
to the appropriate page, using byte range retrieval.

Received on Thursday, 17 April 2003 03:17:54 UTC