I don't know who brought this up, and I've only skimmed over these
messages.
This business of refering to parts of things has been done by the
HyTime standard committee. Please read what they have to say before
making up your own system. You might find some stuff you can use.
I would guess that all you need to do is pick and choose from the
hytime loc idioms. In fact, I bet if you posted to comp.text.sgml with
a bunch of made-up idioms, Elliot Kimber would explain how to spell
those idioms in a HyTime conforming way (or several such ways) within
48 hours.
You might not like the way they spell things -- they're very verbose.
But when you consider the fact that once you've spelled it the HyTime
way, you probably won't have to translate it to another syntax for 10
years or so (and by that time, there will be tools to do it for you)
it starts to make sense.
The more HyTime technology you borrow, the more WWW will be able to
benefit from other resources applied to HyTime technology (which isn't
much now, but I expect it will be soon).
Don't make the mistake of ignoring this significant body of knowledge.
Dan
p.s. Unfortunately, there's not much info avalable on the net
about HyTime. The best pointer I can give is:
ftp://ftp.ifi.uio.no/pub/SGML/HyTime
Poke around elsewhere in
for variously related bits of info.