Re: Hyperlinks: 3.3, agree with Martin; new req. 3.4, self-revealing links.

At 12:48 PM 12/20/96 CST, Michael Sperberg-McQueen wrote:
>On Fri, 20 Dec 1996 11:56:53 -0500 David Durand said:
>>At 8:19 PM 12/19/96, Tim Bray wrote:
>>>3. Minimum Progress on Hyperlink Enhancement
>>>
>>>The minimum set of hyperlink constructs should:
>>>3.3 support addressing at least by URL and ID attribute, alone or
>>>    in combination.
>>
>>And offset, of some sort. Martin is right about limitations of read-only
>>documents.
>
>I agree strongly that reference to SGML elements not bearing IDs is
>very useful and not too hard to try to do.
>
>I agree also, though much less strongly, that reference to spans
>which are not SGML elements is useful.  It's not nearly as easy,
>though, and may be a tar pit.  (Offset measured in bytes? characters?
>Is a byte an octet or -- this is Unicode -- two octets?  No, it's ISO
>10646 -- four octets?  Is NON SPACING UMLAUT + A one character or
>two?  You mean a smart Unicode system that normalizes my document
>can break incoming links?  Gee, thanks!)

It's not a tar pit (I don't think) when defined in terms of groves because
issues of character representation are resolved in the process of
constructing the grove because each character becomes an individual node.
Through the use of grove plans and, possibly, custom data tokenizers, you
can define exactly how you want the data you're addressing represented.

One of the things I *didn't* mention in my summary of TC changes is that
span locations are now more clearly defined because of groves.  

Cheers,

E.
--
W. Eliot Kimber (eliot@isogen.com) 
Senior SGML Consulting Engineer, Highland Consulting
2200 North Lamar Street, Suite 230, Dallas, Texas 75202
+1-214-953-0004 +1-214-953-3152 fax
http://www.isogen.com (work) http://www.drmacro.com (home)
"Rats in the morning, rats in the afternoon...if they don't go away, I'll be
re-educated soon..."                 --Austin Lounge Lizards, "1984 Blues"

Received on Friday, 20 December 1996 15:01:10 UTC