343912 - RFE: Extended handling of Fragment Identifiers

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 343271

(Firefox :: General, enhancement)

Description

[Dav4is]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.0.4) Gecko/20060508 Firefox/1.5.0.4
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.0.4) Gecko/20060508 Firefox/1.5.0.4

FireFox handling of Fragment Identifiers in HTML documents is well known: Render the page then scroll to the anchor identified by the #Fragment via named A tags, or ID on other tags within the document.

This proposal applies to those cases of HTML documents where a #Fragment is not found in the above sense.

Proposal
FireFox should provide a user option to extend the fragment locator by automatically treating unfound fragments as find requests.

Elements


    * Whether to do a Match Case find or not may be specified as a sub-option.
    * If the URI identifies a new document, the find context should be the top of the new document.
    * Otherwise, i.e. the link consists of only the fragment identiifier, the find context should be the position of the referencing A tag making the link.
    * A link containing any URI part (before the hash mark) is treated as a new document even if identifying the same one as currently displayed -- i.e. the find context is the top of the document.



It is my belief that this proposed action is permitted by current HTTP and HTML architecture and specifications.

Usage
The proposal will be particularly useful in those cases where an author of one document wishes to refer to a part of another document but the author of the second document has not identified that part by an attribute in the markup.



Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
N/A
Actual Results:  
N/A

Expected Results:  
N/A

Considering the failure to locate an anchor in the document matching a given Fragment Identifier to be an error, the user agent is free to correct that error with the user's consent, which consent may be in the form of a previously selected option. I refer you to the Error Handling section of Architecture of the World Wide Web (http://www.w3.org/TR/webarch/#error-handling). Also: http://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/Fragment.html

Comment 1

[Phil Ringnalda (:philor)]

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 343271 ***