[whatwg] fragment and query identifies

[Dave Singer]

I think this discussion is pretty orthogonal to the video/audio tags 
as well, but...here goes...


as I understand it, fragment identifiers are (a) interpreted 
client-side, and not strictly 'part of' the URL (they are not sent to 
the server) and (b) have a format and syntax defined by the type of 
the resource fetched.  That is, if http://example.org/a.xyz says that 
it is returning a thing of type text/html, then the spec that defined 
that mime type tells you how to interpret a fragment after the #.

Indeed, for an audio/video resource, work done in annodex and in 
MPEG-21 could tell a client-side to interpret a fragment as a 
time-offset place to start playback, a time-slice of the resource, or 
a whole host of things.  The MPEG-21 family of specs has defined a 
fairly rich set of such capabilities for MPEG-4 files.

Then, also as I understand it, a query syntax is part of the URL, as 
is interpreted by the server, and the syntax and format is defined 
and owned by the targetted server.  So indeed, there is no reason why 
http://example.org/dynamic.stuff?makemp4=something should not 
dynamically make an MP4 file containing whatever 'something' says it 
should.  This is pretty much out of scope of how that is embedded, 
though, isn't it?

This is probably pretty obvious to the rest of you, hope I didn't 
take too long stating the obvious...
-- 
David Singer
Apple Computer/QuickTime