I agree. Many of the indexing and cross-referencing
proposals could (and I believe, should) be handled
by the document-producing systems.
My first thought when this particular topic came up
was that there should be some sort of MIRROR and tag
that would equal the rendered form of the #NAME it
referenced. This could be cool for ordered lists,
server-side modifications and other stuff.
While this might be fun for HTML authors, I can see
all kinds of problems for the display program (you
probably wouldn't start displaying text until all
the references had been resolved).
By resolving these things with simple macros when you
create the document, you can avoid the whole issue.
(And your stuff will work with current browsers!)
-Lon
lon@rladvert.com