Re: XPointer

fielding@apache.org (Roy T. Fielding) writes:
>The interpretation of fragment identifiers is media-type specific.
>That does not mean that it is a good idea to define the format of
>a fragment differently for every media type.  

That claim falls far short of a prohibition on media types defining
their own fragment identifiers.  I'd be very curious what you think of
SVG's svgView fragment identifier:
http://www.w3.org/TR/SVG/linking.html#SVGFragmentIdentifiers

>Allowing the same
>identifier to apply to multiple media types isn't always possible,
>but it is desirable except in those very rare situations
>where the user actually intends to identify a specific XML element
>(as opposed to the content encapsulated by that element).

I think we may have a severe cultural mismatch here. While most
developers working with XML are happy to distinguish markup from
content, the notion of markup as a map overlaid on the content is pretty
deeply embedded.  You seem to be saying that we shouldn't use the maps,
when the existence of the map is precisely what makes XML useful.

RFC 2396 defines a distinction between resources and representations,
but you appear to insist on ignoring that distinction when the
representation might in fact be more useful than the resource.  

The failure of URI references to account for the possibility of
different representations does not strike me as a particularly good
reason to insist that developers not take advantage of the features of
those representations in indentifying fragments.


-------------
Simon St.Laurent - SSL is my TLA
http://simonstl.com may be my URI
http://monasticxml.org may be my ascetic URI
urn:oid:1.3.6.1.4.1.6320 is another possibility altogether

Received on Thursday, 31 October 2002 18:36:31 UTC