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[REQ] Element IDs in the web specification

Sean Conner sean at conman.org

Sat Jun 27 22:17:42 BST 2020

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It was thus said that the Great Brian Evans once stated:

I would like to link to the `text/gemini` portion of the spec for a
project I am working on. However, there are no IDs on any of the elements.
This makes it impossible to link someone directly to a section. :(
If this can get updated it would be much appreciated. I am trying to link
it as additional information for non-technical users... so linking to the
full spec might be overwhelming.
I know it has been brought up before to separate text/gemini from the
protocol spec, and just thought I would float that here again...

On the plus side, there are two RFCs (RFC-5147 and RFC-7111) that defineURI fragment semantics to particular resource types. Downside, they don'tdirectly apply to text/gemini.

One method would be to use verbatim text as the ID, starting from thestart of the line. So for your use case:

gemini://gemini.circumlunar.space/docs/specification.gmi#%235%20The

the fragment portion, decoded, would be "# 5 The" (note: the '#' here isencoded as %23). The client would then scan through the document inquestion looking for a line that starts with "# The" and position thedocument accordingly in the window/viewport/terminal.

The second method would be to adapt the one for text/plain (RFC-5147).

The two methods have the advantage of not modifying text/gemini and couldbe a convention of clients util some method clearly beomces the winner.

-spc