Re: forwarded... [Explicit Linking is Impossible]

aronsson@lysator.liu.se
Date: Thu, 6 May 1993 01:21:40 +0200
From: aronsson@lysator.liu.se
Message-id: <199305052321.AA07208@bodil.lysator.liu.se>
To: www-talk@nxoc01.cern.ch
Subject: Re: forwarded... [Explicit Linking is Impossible]
In message <m0nqrsc-000EZYC@garnet.msen.com>,
Edward Vielmetti <emv@garnet.msen.com> wrote:

>                  ; often times it's enough to pre-load a search that
>takes people near the right place.  E.g. you don't say "page 342 of
>ISBN 1-56592-027-9" you say "Look up the section on environment
>variables in the O'Reilley MH book".

What exactly does "pre-load a search" mean, and how do I implement
this in an HTML document?  Say that I want to refer to the WWW
Provider's Style Guide by Tim Berners-Lee at CERN, for the section
about how big to make each document.  Now, all of you readers of
www-talk can find this manually, and have probably already read that
text, but that is not why someone invented hypertext and the
world-wide web.  How do I do this without explicitly saying
href="http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/Provider/Style/DocSize.html"?

What if Tim and his WWW service moves from CERN to a new place?  What
if Tim decides to rename "WWW/Provider/Style" to "WWWSTYLE.DIR"?  I
don't say that he would, but he certainly could, and that would be
like pulling the rug away from under my feet.  Would I fall and would
that hurt?  If someone can pull this rug, why should I stand on it?

I would be happier to refer to an ISBN number, because then I only
specify the publisher, and not the library where I found the book, and
there would be an organization for registering new ISBN numbers that
would stop an author from changing a documents name.

There are already number series for books (ISBN) and serials (ISSN).
What I seem to ask for is ISHN, or an International Standard for
Hypertext Numbers.  These would have to be longer than ISBN numbers,
because they would not only refer to books, but also to sections and
paragraphs within a book.  An author would register an ISHN for each
section or paragraph of his book, and other authors could only refer
to these numbers.  After that, the author must not change his book.
This sounds too complicated to me, so lets hear some better solutions!