World Wide Web current failings:
- No recognized way of referencing passages of documents
- Fragment identifiers cannot be used to efficiently reference down to the word or character level.
- Linked documents have a tendency to disappear, thus rendering references less useful
- No recognized way of referring to a particular version of a document, whose integrity is guaranteed
Solution:
- Introduce sub-fragment references syntax for
href
:
<a href=”http://example.com/document#fragment[495,w24,513-859,1021,1249-1250]”>
- List of character/character range references
- This depends on a knowing the document’s character set
- List of word/word range references
- This depends on a tokenization algorithm
- Introduce document content hash syntax for
href
:
<a href=”http://example.com/document@a9e1bb2429″>…</a>
<a href=”object://a9e1bb2429″>…</a>
- Extend HTTP to allow request of specific document versions ?
This is actually probably handled fine at the application layer
- Define standard for embedding referenced documents into an HTML document, e.g.
<html>
<head>
<object hash="a9e1bb2429">
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
...
</html>
</object>
<object hash="ff4d042c90">
...
</object>
</head>
<body>...</body>
</html>
<object> is like an <iframe>
The hash attribute has no effect? Just there to help developers? But it violates DRY because it can be computed.