

Re: Viral fragment identity ecosystem

From: Steven Ellis <steve@xulux.com>
Date: Tue, 04 Oct 2005 18:46:33 +0100
Message-ID: <4342BFF9.5080506@xulux.com>
To: www-html@w3.org

Orion Adrian wrote:

 >On 10/4/05, Ryan King <ryan@theryanking.com> wrote:
 >>On Oct 2, 2005, at 8:48 PM, Steven Ellis wrote:
 >>>I think that document fragments, whether they be structurally or
 >>>conceptually coherent, need to be permitted formal expression in
 >>>XHTML. The simplest illustration of this may be xhtml microformats.
 >>>Bracing microformats (and other fragments) using globally unique
 >>>identifiers would permit machine isolation and analysis, cross
 >>>referencing, consensus, scriptability, coalescence, and the
 >>>association of folksonomies with high resolution.
 >>>Please consider an attribute capable of accepting an arbitrary
 >>>'unique concept / null concept' identifier.
 >>><div identity="3C05DC85-DC34-4546-9210-02EC43188367" id="MyCard"
 >>>In this case 3C05DC85-DC34-4546-9210-02EC43188367 may achieve
 >>>consensus as an hCard microformat reference.  Can you speculate how
 >>>this will scale? I thought it good enough to share.
 >>Personally, I think URLs + id attributes are enough.
 >URL's change as do id's so it's not really enough. To make something
 >truly identifiable it's universal identifier can't change after
 >creation. URL's can do that while behaving, but id's most certainly
 >will not given the tight integration of HTML elements and CSS.
 >Orion Adrian
Precisely said, thanks

A fragment  identifier marks a portion of the document that has some, it 
doesn't matter what, conceptual coherence. Utility is not restricted to 
microformats. When useful identities spread, re-occurance generates an 
ontological clue, crucially the fragment is an order of magnitude more 
specific than a parent document or id reference, it delineates the start 
and end of the pertinant fragment first of all. Even my perl can parse that.

Scaled identities would be messy but far from chaos. A wonderful mess of 
the kind we've seen before.

It is curious why abstract object specification and the limited 
dimensionality of id and class have not been addressed in the past 
(please let me know if you know otherwise). Id and class are polluted by 
a stylistic subcontext, read 
http://www.shirky.com/writings/ontology_overrated.html considering css 
as the libraries shelf.

Arbitrary specified fragment identity and fragment validation, when 
scaled and applied together, permit the (specified) context of targetted 
content to be resolved. Surely concept identifiers are more significant 
than any call for any pedantic adherence  to somebody elses idea of a 
document/ontology, as well as being far easier to implement?

Semantics depend on a flux of identities, they are harder to create than 
they are to spot.

Eric Clapton said "Let it Grow"
Received on Tuesday, 4 October 2005 18:33:47 GMT
