I seem to be forever repeating myself. The syntax above is not
correct. The TEI people have already been down this path, and already
have a syntax which I proposed quite some time ago as an extension to
URL's for performing sub-document addressing. In fact, they have 2
syntaxes which are equally useful.
section=1/subsection=2/para=3
or
1/2/3
I should note that HTML has few containiers as noted above, but we can
just look upon this as a degenerate case of deeply structured
documents. In fact, even things like RTF and LaTeX can have thier
components addressed by such schemes.
Now, the real proof that this is useful can be seen in the DynaWeb
server that I wrote for EBT. In DynaWeb, we can use either of the
above 2 schemes, or direct element addressing (DynaWeb serves up
large SGML books (a single database) and use the above to navigate the
internals of a document. ) I should note that in DynaWeb, almost every
URL is generated on the fly from the structure of the document, for
example, TOC's aree generated automatically.
Why reinvent the wheel? The TEI people have thought long and hard
about this, and it works well in practise. Stop thinking of documents
as linear block of text: even the most trivial document has a tree
structure. Think like this, and such schemes just fall out of the
woodwork.