Someone else has mentioned that it is probably better to have such
data seperated from the document so that the document data sent with,
and without highlighting, would be identical. I agree with this. In
addition to this, defining a standard for basic query constructs seems
desirable. Keyword search is very limiting.
>A HyTime link to the 20th through 35th characters of
>the 4th child of the element with id "FOO" can't possibly
>work when browsers don't even count the same way.
True, and another problem is the definition of "character", though I
don't think non-conformance of browsers is a good technical reason for
not using such links. I should note that the choice of quantum will be
important. In general, the higher the structural level of the quantum,
the more robust (in the face of application-variations) such links
should be.
I think another very important argument in favor of HyTime-like
linking is that such links can be used with data types other than
HTML. I feel it to be *very* desirable to define a general mechanism
so that all data could be treated equally. For example, what would one
do if one wants to highlight a region of a graphic or movie?
Admittedly, the overhead (in terms of implementation cost) for a
generalised mechanism will be higher than paired tags, but I think the
benefits might very well outweigh the costs.