Linking to frozen documents
Requirements
The fact that much data is not marked
up currently means that links to
it must be made to the document URL
only, and not to the fragment within
them. With frozen documents, however,
it is safe to use some sort of corrdinate
system to define an anchor.
Linking to them
Mail and news articles are frozen
once they are posted. One can therefore
make links to specific lines or characters
in them, by given an anchor name
which is a line or character range.
A good solid unambiguous specification
of pointers into arbitrary MIME messages
would be needed. The plain text
object would have to be extended
to allow this form of anchor to be
generated.
The same applies to anchors in images
such as GIFs or even videos. The
anchor shape should be defined in
an N dimensional polygon. See, and
be compatible with, the HTML+ "SHAPE"
attribute in the anchor element.
Linking from them
A possible interesting intermediate
form of object is a plain (non-hyper)
object which uses link/char count
ranges or shapes for anchor names,.
and which allows outgoing links which
are stored in the rfc8222 style object
metainformation.
This would allow annotatin on images,
and frozen documents.
Software components
See HyTime and see whether its methods
apply.
Modifications to image (HyperCell
fo rthe NeXTStep editor) classes
and plain tex tobject to support
selection and anchor generation.
Tim BL