Fragment Identifiers and XHTML

Hi,

   I think there is somewhere a problem with fragment identifiers for
XHTML documents labeled as application/xhtml+xml. The latest draft
inherits the rules of RFC 3023. RFC 3023 doesn't say anything about
fragment identifiers, since XPointer hasn't been a recommendation at
time of publication (and it still isn't), thus fragment identifiers
won't apply to application/xhtml+xml documents until RFC 3023 gets
updated to hand fragment identifier issues over to XPointer. XPointer
says it applies to resources "whose Internet media type is one of
text/xml, application/xml, text/xml-external-parsed-entity, or
application/xml-external-parsed-entity". application/xhtml+xml isn't
mentioned. XPointer also says that it is suitable for other derieved
types but this doesn't mean to me it actually applies to those types.
This may need some clarification in XPointer.

However, there is a discrepancy between text/html and
application/xhtml+xml, RFC 2854 says the fragment identifier refers to
named items, named by either id attributes or name attributes for some
elements. XPointer allows the shorthand notation #frag only as
abbreviated form for xpointer(id('frag')) and inherits the rules of
XPath for the id() function. XPath says the id() function may only be
used for attributes declared as having an ID content model, this
conflicts with the name attributes in HTML. XHTML 1.0 first edition
resolves this issue by requiring documents to use the id attribute if
one wants to use fragment identifiers, XHTML 1.0 Second Edition marks
the section where this requirement appears (section 4.10) as
informative, thus I don't think it is of any relevance for conforming
documents. So, documents using only the name attribute are strictly
conforming documents but the fragment identifier won't work as expected.
I don't think this is intended.

regards,
-- 
Björn Höhrmann { mailto:bjoern@hoehrmann.de } http://www.bjoernsworld.de
am Badedeich 7 } Telefon: +49(0)4667/981028 { http://bjoern.hoehrmann.de
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Received on Tuesday, 9 October 2001 20:01:24 UTC