Re: HTML media type vs. # URIs that do not identify document elements

On Fri, 2010-02-05 at 14:47 -0500, noah_mendelsohn@us.ibm.com wrote:
> Jonathan Rees writes:
> 
> > Clearly being out of spec does not seem to be a problem for anyone who
> > does this kind of thing, but it is sort of an embarrassment.
> 
> I can't dispute that it doesn't "seem" to be, but I think I'm right that 
> having HTML fragments used in this way could cause a user agent to do the 
> wrong thing, I.e., to attempt to scroll to or otherwise focus on a piece 
> of the document with that identifier.

You say that like it's a bad thing.

i.e. what's "wrong" about that?

>   Though most browsers fail silently 
> when there's no match on a fragid, I don't think it would be inappropriate 
> for a browser or any other software to display some sort of "URI doesn't 
> resolve" error message when attempting to dereference such a URI.

Why would browsers do anything different from what they do now?
What do you mean by "such a URI"? All the browser knows is
that it's a URI.

>   So, I 
> don't think this usage is entirely benign.

It's pretty harmless on the hypertext side.

On the semantic web side, you might run into consistencies of
the form "X can't be both an XML element and a Person"... which
is one benefit of the @about attribute in RDFa... it doesn't/needn't
get attached to an XML element.

I go back and forth on this a bit, but for some years I have
leaned toward an update to the HTML media type in this
area.

I wrote about this in a 2006 workshop paper...

[[
In order for this to work with documents published both in RDF/XML and
XHTML, the XHTML media type specifications may need to be ammended so
that authors can opt out of the section-of-the-document meaning of
fragment identifiers that they publish. For example, the profile
attribute from section 7.4.4.3 Meta data profiles of the HTML 4
specification[HTML4] seems like a reasonable opt-out signal.
]]
 -- section Fragments as sections vs. people
  http://www.w3.org/2006/04/irw65/urisym#docdata

-- 
Dan Connolly, W3C http://www.w3.org/People/Connolly/
gpg D3C2 887B 0F92 6005 C541  0875 0F91 96DE 6E52 C29E

Received on Friday, 5 February 2010 21:19:46 UTC