Re: Proposition on advanced URL features (Request for comments)

Paul Prescod (papresco@calum.csclub.uwaterloo.ca)
Tue, 28 Nov 1995 07:39:34 -0500


#1. I think that your introduction unnecessarily complicates the issue.

At 09:28 PM 11/27/95 +0100, Mirsad Todorovac wrote:
>There is a rapidly growing number of documents which are generated
>automatically, by programs. Although, many documents get generated by
>online CGI scripts. Often there is a need to reference particular part
>of a large document, which is created by a program we don't want to change,
>or we don't own it.

All of the stuff above seems to me to be a special case of the section below:

>There are documents which we do not own, and we want to
>reference certain parts of them, but they do not have <a name> tags where we
>would like them to be, and there is nothing we can do about it.

This could be described as:

"There are documents which we do not own, cannot change or that are
generated by software that we do not own or cannot change."

#2. There has been a _lot_ of work done on inter-document addressing in
TEI[1] and HyTime[2] and I would encourage you to investigate them before
you make your report. They are probably too complex for what you want, but
they can at least provide a basis for a syntax, and for extensibility into
more advanced addressing. Consider, for example, the case where you are
linking to something _other than_ an HTML (or even SGML) document.

Paul Prescod

[1]http://www.uic.edu/orgs/tei/p3/doc/p3sa.doc
[2]ftp://ftp.ifi.uio.no/pub/SGML/HyTime/HyQ-1.1.Kimber