Re: fragment identifiers

On Tuesday, July 23, 2002, at 07:07  AM, Tim Bray wrote:
> I'm not sure about that - in *valid* HTML, in principle, a fragment could 
> refer to a "portion" of the data; in real life a fragment seems 
> effectively an arrow pointing at a location within the document... I've 
> never seen a user agent that would process foo.html#bar by selecting out 
> the element that had name="bar" or id="bar", only by maneuvering to where 
> that element starts.

That's true for typical Web browsers (or, at least, that they shift
their view of the virtual document such that the anchor is at the
top of the page or within one view-window of the bottom of the page).
I hesitate to make general statements about Web architecture on the
basis of browser UI, since a speech-only renderer should skip
directly to the anchor.

BTW, the reason for this oddness in handling anchors is because HTML
does not allow anchors to be embedded within other anchor elements.
Thus, HTML destination anchors don't enclose the entire target.

XML can do better.

....Roy

Received on Tuesday, 23 July 2002 18:35:03 UTC