In 1997 Sun Microsystems and Jakob Nielson, the noted web design and usability guru, were granted a patent on a "Method and system for implementing hypertext scroll attributes" by the US Patent Office. The patent describes the process of using a string to define an external anchor for an HTML document. The string is defined in the link to the HTML document, and the web browser, on loading the document defined by the link, will scroll to the first occurrence of the text string within the document -- hardly an innovation.
The first sign that this, like
Unlike its companions XLink and XML Base, XPointer has retreated from Candidate Recommendation to Last Call Working Draft status.
Daniel Veillard noted that:
"This second Last Call has been made necessary by a change required to XPointer to insure that URI References built using XPointer are context independant. This specific addition is detailed in section 5.2.1 of this XPointer Working Draft."
The problem appears to revolve around namespaces, as the spec now adds:
"For any XPointer part that uses the xpointer scheme, the evaluation context
XPointer is a system for addressing components of XML based internet media.
At the present time (late 2002), XPointer is divided among four specifications: a "framework" which forms the basis for identifying XML fragments, a positional element addressing scheme, a scheme for namespaces, and a scheme for XPath-based addressing.
The XPointer language is designed to address structural aspects of XML, including text content and other information objects created as a result of parsing the document. Thus, it could be used to point to a section of a
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