I wish that I
knew a good way in HTML to express offsets from beginning
of a document.
Are you taking about an artibrary HTML document that you may not have
control over? Or just for HTML documents you control? If the latter, then
there are two methods---one works for all browsers, and the other for more
modern ones.
Just thinking of the PDP-10 archives, it would be real nice if there
were a standard way to let someone reference into the middle of a document
with a standardized content-based offset reference.
For example, someone who is talking about historical LISP's wants
to reference something in the MACLISP reference manual pulled from
a 1970's tape on my site. The original document was not, of course, in
HTML; it was just HTML rendered for web presentation.
They can link to the entire HTML-rendered
version of the document, but it's hundreds of screens long. It would
be nice if there were a way to automatically and context-sensitively
reference something in the middle of the document - and in a way
such that future renderings of the same document still had the same
tags, despite moving to different presentation technologies.
Since many of the original documents were formatted to be presented
on line printers, or on terminal screens, the concepts of "page" and
"line" usually exist. Some of them have originals in RUNOFF-type
sources, where there may be some kind of context-referencing system
in place, but the details of the kind vary from document to document.
So it looks like the best way is to let others index in by original
page number, or original line numbers.
A future project would probably be a way of turning all the different
variants of RUNOFF (and the variants span 3 decades at least, 4 or 5
decades if you count those who still used it in the 90's and 2000's)
into HTML with good invariant content-based subreferences.
Tim.
