Re: Anchors/Fragments ?

Peter Lister, Cranfield Computer Centre (P.Lister@cranfield.ac.uk)
Mon, 24 Jan 94 11:06:28 GMT

I asked a connected question some time ago. The net.wisdom was that
'//fred/foo?bar' implies a query 'bar' sent to server 'fred' in the
context of path 'foo'; interpretation of 'bar' is up to fred, and the
browser is not expected to do anything special to the reply, other than
display it normally.

'//fred/foo#bar' means that the browser requests 'foo' from fred
(without mentioning 'bar'), and displays the reply in manner
illustrating the part of the reply marked 'bar' (e.g. an HTML anchor
with includes 'name="bar"' ).

Fragments (#) are interpreted by the browser, queries (?) by the
server. The difference is *not* semantic in terms of document
structure: a 'query' need not be a question per se, it could
semantically be a logical 'fragment'; equally, a 'fragment' could be
something more normally associated with a question, (e.g. if the reply
were a plain text file, the browser might insert a linked list of
anchors around each occurence of 'bar').

Peter Lister Email: p.lister@cranfield.ac.uk
Computer Centre, Cranfield University Voice: +44 234 754200 ext 2828
Cranfield, Bedfordshire MK43 0AL UK Fax: +44 234 750875
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