October 12... hyperlinks and chunks

I’ve been looking for an even-handed and comprehensive summary of the debate around W3C Patents. At first glance, this “Patents, Royalties, and the Future of the Web” (XML.com) looks good. I’m heartened to read that Apple and HP are now publicly in favor of royalty-free standards. Could this mean that there is a chance that the proposed policy will be defeated? (I shouldn’t get my hopes up, however.)

"Hyperlinking" to Microsoft Word and Acrobat "anchors"

The equivalent of HTML anchors (which allow one to refer to a specific part of an HTML document) is available in Microsoft Word as bookmarks and Adobe Acrobat PDF as "named destinations". I've been very interested in these equivalents because I do a lot of writing in Word and a lot of gathering of documents in PDF; I'd like to be able to address these pieces on my own computer to build an internal Web. (I once posed a general question about universal addressability of resources in an operating system.) Ideally, these addresses would be references that I could type as any other address into Explorer. It turns out that one can use named destinations while accessing a PDF file through a browser. However, one can't make use of the named destination through Explorer or through any command line interfaces. One might be able to use Interapplication Communication (IAC) (is this OLE or DDE?) to tell Acrobat to jump to the named destination. It seems that there is no command line invocation of Microsoft Word to go to a particular bookmark either -- one would have to do some scripting.

Since named destinations work through the web browser, an alternative approach is to serve files through the webserver locally -- but I'm concerned about the obvious security problems of serving a lot of my internal files through the browser. (IP filtering to make sure that the request is local might help.)

Sep Nov

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