Re: Including files

John C. Mallery <JCMa@reagan.ai.mit.edu>
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Date: Thu, 9 Jun 1994 16:32:33 +0200
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From: John C. Mallery <JCMa@reagan.ai.mit.edu>
To: Multiple recipients of list <www-talk@www0.cern.ch>
Subject: Re: Including files 
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    Date: Thu, 9 Jun 1994 08:36 EDT
    From: Rainer Klute <klute@tommy.informatik.uni-dortmund.de>

    >Whatever would happen when you created a single HTML document should happen
    >when you include subdocuments.  This means that its up to the user to write
    >"partial" HTML documents and/or the browser could ignore the second HEAD pair
    >(if everyone used HEAD) and just ignore the BODY.  Since the latter probably
    >isn't DTD compliant, its up to the user to make sure the document looks right.

    It's far more complicated. (But that shouldn't prevent us from
    specifying and implementing it.) The general case is to include
    only part of the document, for example just a single paragraph from
    someone else's larger work. Or even the whole document - which
    would in this case mean the <BODY> element, but without the <BODY>
    tags. We first need to have a specification on how to reference a
    certain part of a document and second have servers being able to
    extract the referenced part from the HTML file and put it on the
    wire.

This means extending URL syntax to reference regions in documents, not just
named points. 

You need to points to make a region.

So, you could cheat by adding href-end= (gross).

Or better, your could have some url syntax like http://foo.bar.bas/doc.html#start,end

It would be nice if START and END could be more than just document position
tags.  Once we have some concept on referencing fragements by alternative
schemes in the URN spec, one should be able to use these.

One idea is positional specs like:

#{char=24},{char=40}

#{h1=1},{h1=2}

The general idea is that one provides a variety of named methods for denoting
a position in a document.  These can be extended as better ideas come along.

Note that this ability to reference fragments is exactly what WIT needs to in
order for prople to effectively respond to parts of what other say.

It would be extremely desirable (but hard) to be able to resolve URL region
fragments without fully accessing the document.