Re: Fragment Identifiers and Agent Perspectives

On 10/7/2011 7:11 PM, ashok malhotra wrote:
> Currently, the specs say "fragment identifier semantics are defined by the
> media type".
> We should amend this to say "fragment identifier semantics are defined by
> the media type and
> the kind of agent that is making use of the markup".

I understand the proposal, but I'm not convinced it's good architecture. 
Webarch [1] distinguishes direct and indirect identification, making clear 
that a given URI should be a first class identifier for at most one 
resource. If the same URI is to be used to identify something else as well, 
then the identification is viewed as indirect.

Crucially, it's not the nature of the agent making the reference, but the 
nature of the dereference operation that's in question. Thus, we might say 
e.g. that http://example.org/people.html#noah is a first class identifier 
for a part of the document people.html, and an indirect identifer for a 
person Noah. Any agent can then decide whether it wishes to do a direct or 
indirect dereference. I think that's far stronger architecturally than 
saying that: "fragment identifier semantics are defined by [...] the kind 
of agent that is making use of the markup".

Noah

[1] http://www.w3.org/TR/webarch/#indirect-identification

Received on Monday, 10 October 2011 15:40:41 UTC