- From: David Durand <dgd@cs.bu.edu>
- Date: Wed, 5 Mar 1997 15:21:30 -0500
- To: w3c-sgml-wg@w3.org
At 12:33 PM -0800 3/4/97, Tim Bray wrote: >Background: the draft spec supports SGML-style addressing, traditional >IDREF(S) and also by entity name. > >4.3.a Should we support this type of locator? At least. I think TEI xptr syntax should also be in there. > >4.3.b Should we support entity addressing by name? We should allow the use of entity addressing for LOCSRC or its equivalent, if we have one (and we probably should). I'm not sure that _linking_ to an entity itself makes that much sense (if we preserve the SGML notion that entities are basically abstractions of storage structures). is there a 1-1 correspondence between WWW "resources" (anything with a URL) and SGML entities? >4.3.c Should we support element addressing by ID attribute? yes. >4.3.d Should we support a combination of these two? I think that a LOCSRC facility accomplishes that. If we restrict LOCSRCs to be entities only, and entities to be used only as LOCSRC, I think we cover all the essential ground, though we do in fact lose some power. >4.3.e What syntax should we use? URL syntax for everything... I made one proposal, but others would probably serve aas well or better. I think that some servers will provide server-side fetching of sub-components, but that we should provide a fragment-based mechanism for accessing data withing a parsed sub-tree. As Gavin has noted, this means that an author's decision to use fragment-style querying will prevent certain efficiencies in the server/browser collaboration, but keeping the spec focused on the language and the client side seems like such an important simplification that we should do it. Nothing will prevent the use of external entities or specialized server link resolution, but we will not standardize such mechanisms -- any more than HTML has had to standardize server-includes, despite their great utility... -- David _________________________________________ David Durand dgd@cs.bu.edu \ david@dynamicDiagrams.com Boston University Computer Science \ Sr. Analyst http://www.cs.bu.edu/students/grads/dgd/ \ Dynamic Diagrams --------------------------------------------\ http://dynamicDiagrams.com/ MAPA: mapping for the WWW \__________________________
Received on Wednesday, 5 March 1997 15:23:07 UTC