24 Dec
2008
24 Dec
'08
11:38 p.m.
Fred Cisin wrote:
Inclusion of an "offset operator" would
permit handing a URL to somebody
and having THEIR browser take them to the desired location within the
file, WITHOUT edit rights to the file.
It would permit creating an index to a document WITHOUT requiring
annotation of the original, nor captive environment for display.
The pointers within the index could then be actual access URLs
"RFC.html*684" or http://www.foo.bar/RFC.html*684
I do not like providing a proprietary viewer that must be used to be able
to see the referenced items within the file.
You could probably write a Firefox plugin to do exactly what you
describe on other people's content. It would, however, be a function of
the client, not HTML itself.
Just as a thought, you could implement this on the server side by
parsing out the offset from the URI handed to you by the client, and
adding an <a> tag as the page is rendered. If you used "#" as the
delimiter for the offset, then placed the <a> tag the appropriate number
of bytes in with that number of bytes as the anchor value.
Let me give you an example:
You request http://www.gjcp.net/hypothetical.html#1024
The server strips off "#1024" and generates hypothetical.html (this
would actually be a dynamically-generated page, not just flat HTML)
At byte 1024, the server inserts a <a name="#1024">named</a> anchor
tag,
which the browser will jump to.
You *could*, if you were so inclined, even do this as an Apache module,
to apply this to static files.
Gordon