Linking to frozen documents

Requirements

The fact that much data is not marked up currently means that links to it must be made to the document URL only, and not to the fragment within them. With frozen documents, however, it is safe to use some sort of corrdinate system to define an anchor.

Linking to them

Mail and news articles are frozen once they are posted. One can therefore make links to specific lines or characters in them, by given an anchor name which is a line or character range. A good solid unambiguous specification of pointers into arbitrary MIME messages would be needed. The plain text object would have to be extended to allow this form of anchor to be generated.

The same applies to anchors in images such as GIFs or even videos. The anchor shape should be defined in an N dimensional polygon. See, and be compatible with, the HTML+ "SHAPE" attribute in the anchor element.

Linking from them

A possible interesting intermediate form of object is a plain (non-hyper) object which uses link/char count ranges or shapes for anchor names,. and which allows outgoing links which are stored in the rfc8222 style object metainformation.

This would allow annotatin on images, and frozen documents.

Software components

See HyTime and see whether its methods apply.

Modifications to image (HyperCell fo rthe NeXTStep editor) classes and plain tex tobject to support selection and anchor generation.

Tim BL