CSS Selectors for Fragment Identifiers now a W3C Community Group

    CSS Selectors are a powerful tool for precisely identifying any 
piece (or pieces) of a document.  It's always seemed like they might 
be useful in contexts beyond applying style information.  For 
example, hypertext anchors desperately need a toolset with that kind 
of power.  Right now, the vast majority of links point to a document 
as a whole, even when referring to a specific piece of the document. 
Unless there's an ID to address with a fragment, you can't point to a 
specific element within a linked document, let alone a set of 
elements.
    That train of thought led Simon St.Laurent and me, with helpful 
input from several smart folks, to write "CSS Selectors for Fragment 
Identifiers":

http://simonstl.com/articles/cssFragID.html

Basically, this combines CSS selectors with a touch of XPointer 
syntax to create an approach for linking to (or potentially from) any 
point or points in a document.  After a couple of decades of hoping 
document maintainers might put in anchors, it's time to try something 
more flexible.  Note that this doesn't modify, extend, or otherwise 
alter CSS Selectors!  It simply proposes that we put them to work in 
another context.
    We're happy to say that as of this morning there is now (finally!) 
a W3C Community Group to talk about the idea:

http://www.w3.org/community/cssselfrags/

We're just getting started, so please join the conversation!

-- 
Eric A. Meyer (eric@meyerweb.com)     http://meyerweb.com/

Received on Friday, 2 March 2012 19:26:57 UTC