Re: Liaison statement on fragment identifiers from Linking WG

Jon Bosak writes:
 > [Joel Nava:]
 > 
 > | Just for the record, I agree with Bill Smith's and Lauren
 > | Wood's concerns, and hope that they can be resolved.
 > 
 > Same here.  I think that this is a serious problem.

Indeed we all agree it is a serious problem, and I am glad it has been 
raised.

Just for the sake of completeness let me reiterate the HTML WG's
position:

	We want as much as possible to be a 'normal' XML application,
	and follow as far as possible existing W3C recommendations.

	We want to offer some short-term transition aids.

The current feeling of the group is to make ID of type ID, and NAME of 
type NAME (it almost sounds too good to be true), and to say, (using
Dan Connolly's words):

	if your A NAME attribute values are XML names, you win,
		i.e. you can translate to XHTML without pain.
	else, you lose. Sorry.

Further we add the following stipulation:

	If you use 'name' on an 'a' element, there must be an 'id' on
	the element with the identical value.

We assign no semantics to the 'name' attribute, and it is only there
for the transition period, and will be removed (not just deprecated)
in the next version of XHTML (which will not have the backwards
compatibility requirement).

Objection:

	Some links from existing documents into XMLised versions of
	existing HTML documents which bear the same URL as the old
	version, will not be properly processed (since they use CDATA
	characters in the fragment identifier).

Answer 1: This is a result of the (external to the HTML WG) decision
	to use IDs as fragment identifiers, and even if we decided to
	drop NAME immediately would still exist as a problem.

Answer 2: User agents would just display the beginning of the document 
	rather than the referred-to fragment, so it is not fatal.

Answer 3: In fact, this may even be seen as an advantage, since now
	people can't write 

		<a name="root()">

	anymore, giving us a transition period to Xpointer.

I hope that the various XML groups will be able to live with this
solution.

Best wishes,

Steven Pemberton
Chair, W3C HTML WG

Received on Wednesday, 26 May 1999 09:10:27 UTC