[whatwg] Idea: Links w/o end anchors (is possible)

[Julian Reschke]

Nils Dagsson Moskopp wrote:
> Am Mittwoch, den 22.07.2009, 10:38 +0000 schrieb ppj:
>> The Goal: Links w/o anchors.                                                                                           
>> The Strategy: Two stage process. 
>> 1) get an extra 'search' attribute on to the <a> tag in HTML so that we
>> have:                                                           
>> e.g. <a href='...' search='...'>link text</a>
>> 2) If there's take-up, then later on push for adding a date-time of             creation attribute to <a>. This will add link history to the internet.                                                                                          
>> The way (1) works is someone sticks the basic href to a page in the href
>> attribute, and then sticks the text they want to link to in the search
>> attr. The browser fetches the page, and as a secondary action (at user
>> option) searches for the  
>> text. The simple option is that it just searches for the plain string,
>> maybe later it can do all the fancy approximate match stuff that I put
>> in the XPunt prototype in '06/07.
>> Since we know those search strings don't have to be very long to find
>> the unique location, it shouldn't burden the document text very much.                                                                       
> 
> An additional element seems very hackish; this likely is something
> better brought up in the context of an URI working group. I would also
> recommend talking to implementors directly.

Fragment identifiers depend on the MIME type, thus it's in scope for the 
HTML WG (which is in charge of text/html and application/xhtml+xml).

...but do consider existing work in this area, such as XPointer...

BR, Julian