Re: Liaison statement on fragment identifiers from Linking WG

At 12:44 AM 5/14/99 +0200, Steven Pemberton wrote:
>I can only assume since we are having this discussion that we have
>failed to make this sufficiently clear.

Yes - when I first read the XHTML response, I was irritated first
at the lack of dialogue, second at the fact that apparently they'd
discarded the linking WG input.  Having read it more carefully, it 
seems to me that they've accepted the *important* part of the input, 
which was to adopt the semantic that in XHTML, foo#bar means whatever
element has id="bar" - and to insert an advisory notice that
this won't work in old browsers, so if you care about them,
put name="bar" on there as well.  So at least you get (nominally)
the same behavior with XML, HTML, and RDF, assuming that people
follow the recommendation.

I can also see arguments why it might not be worth the pain
to make name= into an ID attribute when HTML already has a 
perfectly good ID attribute that is in fact being used in DHTML.

I agree with Bill that a lot of people are going to ignore the
recommendation and just go on using "name", and will be surprised
and upset that this doesn't work when you serve the doc as
text/xml.  Speaking for myself, I honestly can't really predict
whether this will be a problem - there is a good chance that anyone
who cares enough to issue a text/xml media type will take the 
trouble to get the IDs in order.  

Steven, is my understanding correct?  Bill, assuming that it is,
am I missing something? -Tim

Received on Thursday, 13 May 1999 18:55:54 UTC