“If we avoid using fragment identifiers to identify abstract concepts then the issue goes away.” – hmm, I guess so, though it does seem a sledgehammer, especially given the number of #terms already in use. I can easily picture httpRange-14 as a necessary evil (hassle), though on all these points I don’t have any better answers :-)

Because of this people say you need to deprecate things like content negotation, effectively separating RDF off into its own little closed network. I’d prefer not to do that. If we avoid using fragment identifiers to identify abstract concepts then the issue goes away. httpRange-14 does fix this but because it adds an additional request into the loop (i.e. the 303 redirect) a lot of people try to avoid it by using fragments.

(Unless perhaps InformationResource is interpreted that way – but your arguments on those are quite compelling, the notion does seem increasingly rubbish each time I look…).

The handling of fragment identifiers [6] is currently defined in Adobe Technical Note 5428 [7]. This section summarizes that material.

A fragment identifier consists of one or more PDF-open parameters in a single URL, separated by the ampersand (&) or pound (#) character. Each parameter implies an action to be performed and the value to be used for that action. Actions are processed and executed from left to right as they appear in the character string that makes up the fragment identifier.

The PDF-open parameters allow the specification of a particular page or named destination to open. Named destinations are similar to the “anchors” used in HTML or the IDs used in XML. Once the target is specified, the view of the page in which it occurs can be specified, either by specifying the position of a viewing rectangle and its scale or size coordinates or by specifying a view relative to the viewing window in which the chosen page is to be presented.

For documents labeled as text/html, the fragment identifier designates the correspondingly named element; any element may be named with the “id” attribute, and A, APPLET, FRAME, IFRAME, IMG and MAP elements may be named with a “name” attribute. This is described in detail in [HTML40] section 12.

But Tim’s recent message made me look closer at this stuff again. HTML is quite clear on the meaning of the fragment, i.e. as a document section. If my RDF says the same then there’s clearly no issue, but if I want #me to represent me in RDF and also to be an anchor in HTML containing a prose description of me then that’s not strictly correct.