I think this discussion is pretty orthogonal to the video/audio tags
as well, but...here goes...
as I understand it, fragment identifiers are (a) interpreted
client-side, and not strictly 'part of' the URL (they are not sent to
the server) and (b) have a format and syntax defined by the type of
the resource fetched. That is, if http://example.org/a.xyz says that
it is returning a thing of type text/html, then the spec that defined
that mime type tells you how to interpret a fragment after the #.
Indeed, for an audio/video resource, work done in annodex and in
MPEG-21 could tell a client-side to interpret a fragment as a
time-offset place to start playback, a time-slice of the resource, or
a whole host of things. The MPEG-21 family of specs has defined a
fairly rich set of such capabilities for MPEG-4 files.
Then, also as I understand it, a query syntax is part of the URL, as
is interpreted by the server, and the syntax and format is defined
and owned by the targetted server. So indeed, there is no reason why
http://example.org/dynamic.stuff?makemp4=something should not
dynamically make an MP4 file containing whatever 'something' says it
should. This is pretty much out of scope of how that is embedded,
though, isn't it?
This is probably pretty obvious to the rest of you, hope I didn't
take too long stating the obvious...
--
David Singer
Apple Computer/QuickTime
