I agree that there needs to be some srt of mechanism for jumping ot the middle
of a document and the client could add a table of virtual <a name=""></a> anchors
or something on their side, but the real problem here (especially if you're talking
about allowing scripts to do this) is the decision that was made in committee a
while back to use the "#" token as a way of specifying a point within a file from
a URL.
I am currently trying to create an imagemap that jumps to one document, but will
go to a different place in the same document depending on which rect, poly, etc
the user clicks on. What I've found is that when trying to specify the location
within the file to jump to with "#" it is treated as a comment and the rest of the
line is ignored so half my URL gets chopped off. This is not only a problem for
imagemap files, but any scripting language (like Perl, csh, and a host of others)
that uses "#" as a comment initiator token. I strongly suggest that the HTML spec
be modified to replace the token with something a little more innocuous. "^"
perhaps?
If anyone has a solution to the imagemap problem I would really appreciate hearing
from you!
Thanks for reading,
Adam T. McClure
Integrated Teaching & Learning Project
CU-Boulder
mcclurea@colorado.edu