[mb-style] Wikipedia AR using urls with hash

[Brian Schweitzer]

On Sun, Mar 9, 2008 at 3:57 AM, Bogdan Butnaru <bogdanb at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Sun, Mar 9, 2008 at 4:11 AM, Brian Schweitzer
>  <brian.brianschweitzer at gmail.com> wrote:
>  >  I'm very aware what fragments are, and how they work, though I wasn't
>  >  aware that the CGI-parser behind Wikipedia's permalink system
>  >  maintained fragment support.
>
>  I'm not sure you do understand it completely. Wikipedia's CGI doesn't
>  need to understand fragments, in fact it doesn't receive it normally.
>  When a browser wants something like
>  "http://some.uri/some/resource#fragment", it sends the server just the
>  address "http://some.uri/some/resource", without the "#fragment" part,
>  it receives the complete page, and then the browser scrolls down to
>  the specified fragment (or a similar operation).

I'm not quite sure why this thread keeps harking back to my personal
understanding of page fragments, rather than the actual topic, but
that assumes the anchors the browser is looking for are maintained
within the page being returned by the server (it would be quite
possible, for example, that fragment identifiers within archived
documents be minified and renamed to save on storage space - as I have
seen archive.org do on several occasions, though I've never had cause
to check whether Wikipedia did it).

In any case, if I can again try to reference back to the original
question here: Should a url for Wikipedia (or indeed, any url AR) be
permitted if it is using anchors?

As I see it, it raises two questions:
1) Should we be linking to pages or to text within pages?  ie: Should
we be linking if the entire page doesn't concern the
release/artist/whatever?
2) If we are to decide to link to text within pages, how should that
link then be done?  Say what you will, but a link to a fragment
identifier within a live page seems to me a bad idea, as it is quite
easy that the linked fragment identifier be removed, even if the page
it is a part of still exists - say an album being originally a subpart
of an artist page, then later being moved to its own page.

It's worth considering Tim Berners-Lee's suggestions on such links
(http://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/Fragment.html ):
* A bookmark to the whole living document, or
* A bookmark to a specific part of a "dead" version;
* Intermediate combinations (I'm not really sure quite what he saw
this as actually being)

If the link pertained to the entire page, we'd just be linking to the
entire page, and not just the fragment within, so the first is out.
That leaves us with:
1) Don't link anchors
2) Link live anchors
3) Link anchors, but only to permalinked pages

Personally, I tend to think 1 the best option, followed by 3 as second
best (since we Oliver has shown that Wikipedia doesn't break fragment
identifiers in permalinked versions), with 2 imho just a bad idea.  It
doesn't really matter if fragment identifiers still work in
permalinked versions, or how well/poorly I personally understand how
they work - noone has yet to address the point that such live anchor
links are much less stable when compared with full pages (live or
permalinked).

Brian