Re: [office] Office document fragment identifier

[Jos van den Oever <jos@vandenoever.info>]

On Monday 04 March 2013 18:15:24 PM Dennis E. Hamilton wrote:
> If by web-based you mean that a browser understands that the fragment part is dealt with on the server side, this will be difficult.  In many cases, the fragment is processed on the returned document, and it would take a MIME-type-based browser plug-in to handle this (and the entire document would be returned over the wire).  I think the usual way to have servers handle this reliably is to do it with the query part (e.g., ?page=42) and have the server deliver HTML[5] by default, not anything like ODF. 

An html5 application could also handle an ODF specific fragment identifier fine. The URL of which such an identifier would be a part would, however, not be listed in the location bar of the browser but passed to the HTML5 application via other means, perhaps stemming from a link in an HTML5 email reader.

> 
> I think there is a lot more that needs to be specified to achieve an interoperable protocol for reference to parts/places in documents using a custom URI fragment syntax.  One consideration has to do with assumption that xml:id values (as in content.xml?id1) be known to an user composing such an URL.  I suspect that it would be more desirable to always use document-level concepts (slides, sheets, headings, table names, cell addresses [not explicit in the ODF XML], bookmarks, etc.) that are commonly user visible and can even be specified by users.
> 
> It is not clear to me why this needs to be internal to the ODF specification.
Agreed: starting with informal support in number of implementations would be a good start for this.

Cheers,
Jos