Re: anchor awareness (was Re: Richer & richer semantics?)

At 01:15 PM 12/23/96 -0800, Terry Allen wrote:
>Eliot writes:
>| >So if we say that "anchor" means "what Hytime calls an anchor" 
>| >we will probably find it necessary to come up with a term 
>| >to describe what "anchor" presently means to many people.  It is 
>| >useful to have a term for anchors-the-author-provided-in-case-
>| >anyone-wants-to-link-to-them.  
>| 
>| How about "element with an ID"?
>
>No, because A's NAME isn't an ID in HTML.  It's just a CDATA label.
>That's true of HTML 3.2, also, and there will be nothing to stop
>people doing the same in XML (and for the same reasons), although
>in XML they may also use IDs (production 52).  

Good point, although there's no reason the HTML NAME attribute *couldn't*
be declared as an SGML ID--it has to be unique within the document.  Of
course, HTML  has a very expansive definition of what constitutes a name or
name start character...

But I meant "ID" more in the generic sense of being uniquely identified.
Certainly the NAME attribute in HTML has this semantic.

Note that an HTML-specific pGrove for an HTML document could use the NAME
value for A elements using the normal SGML property set because at the
property set level the attribute value is just a string, not an SGML NAME
(that's a distinction enforced by the parser before the grove is constructed).

So as far as addressing is concerned, the HTML NAME attribute is just as
good as an SGML ID.

>I suggest that we'll have a much easier time of it all round if we
>accept that the world understands "anchor" as a markup construct,
>and qualify Hytime-anchor as "Hytime anchor," or something similar.
>Right now, I know what Eliot and Steve mean by "anchor," because
>they always speak Hytime.  But I don't know what anyone else means by
>"anchor" unless they gloss themselves.  

I agree that the term "anchor" in particular is way
overloaded--unfortunately I can't think of any better term or terms to
disambiguate anchors as HyTime means them from elements whose semantic is
to be addressed as anchors.  Perhaps it's because I've too deeply
internalized HyTime....

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 Monday, 23 December 1996 17:05:01 UTC