Network Working Group                                           E. Wilde
Request for Comments: 5147                                   UC Berkeley
Updates: 2046                                                  M. Duerst
Category: Standards Track                       Aoyama Gakuin University
                                                             April 2008


        URI Fragment Identifiers for the text/plain Media Type

Status of This Memo

  This document specifies an Internet standards track protocol for the
  Internet community, and requests discussion and suggestions for
  improvements.  Please refer to the current edition of the "Internet
  Official Protocol Standards" (STD 1) for the standardization state
  and status of this protocol.  Distribution of this memo is unlimited.

Abstract

  This memo defines URI fragment identifiers for text/plain MIME
  entities.  These fragment identifiers make it possible to refer to
  parts of a text/plain MIME entity, either identified by character
  position or range, or by line position or range.  Fragment
  identifiers may also contain information for integrity checks to make
  them more robust.


























Wilde & Duerst              Standards Track                     [Page 1]

RFC 5147            text/plain Fragment Identifiers           April 2008


Table of Contents

  1.  Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  3
    1.1.  What Is text/plain?  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  3
    1.2.  What Is a URI Fragment Identifier? . . . . . . . . . . . .  4
    1.3.  Why text/plain Fragment Identifiers? . . . . . . . . . . .  4
    1.4.  Incremental Deployment . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  5
    1.5.  Notation Used in This Memo . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  5
  2.  Fragment Identification Methods  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  5
    2.1.  Fragment Identification Principles . . . . . . . . . . . .  6
      2.1.1.  Positions and Ranges . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  6
      2.1.2.  Characters and Lines . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  7
    2.2.  Combining the Principles . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  7
      2.2.1.  Character Position . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  7
      2.2.2.  Character Range  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  8
      2.2.3.  Line Position  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  8
      2.2.4.  Line Range . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  8
    2.3.  Fragment Identifier Robustness . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  8
  3.  Fragment Identification Syntax . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  9
    3.1.  Integrity Checks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  9
  4.  Fragment Identifier Processing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
    4.1.  Handling of Line Endings in text/plain MIME Entities . . . 10
    4.2.  Handling of Position Values  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
    4.3.  Handling of Integrity Checks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
    4.4.  Syntax Errors in Fragment Identifiers  . . . . . . . . . . 12
  5.  Examples . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12
  6.  IANA Considerations  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13
  7.  Security Considerations  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13
  8.  References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14
    8.1.  Normative References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14
    8.2.  Informative References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14
  Appendix A.  Acknowledgements  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16



















Wilde & Duerst              Standards Track                     [Page 2]

RFC 5147            text/plain Fragment Identifiers           April 2008


1.  Introduction

  This memo updates the text/plain media type defined in RFC 2046 [3]
  by defining URI fragment identifiers for text/plain MIME entities.
  This makes it possible to refer to parts of a text/plain MIME entity.
  Such parts can be identified by either character position or range,
  or by line position or range.  Integrity checking information can be
  added to a fragment identifier to make it more robust, enabling
  applications to detect changes of the entity.

  This section gives an introduction to the general concepts of text/
  plain MIME entities and URI fragment identifiers, and it discusses
  the need for fragment identifiers for text/plain and deployment
  issues.  Section 2 discusses the principles and methods on which this
  memo is based.  Section 3 defines the syntax, and Section 4 discusses
  processing of text/plain fragment identifiers.  Section 5 shows some
  examples.

1.1.  What Is text/plain?

  Internet Media Types (often referred to as "MIME types"), as defined
  in RFC 2045 [2] and RFC 2046 [3], are used to identify different
  types and sub-types of media.  RFC 2046 [3] and RFC 3676 [6] specify
  the text/plain media type, which is used for simple, unformatted
  text.  Quoting from RFC 2046 [3]: "Plain text does not provide for or
  allow formatting commands, font attribute specifications, processing
  instructions, interpretation directives, or content markup.  Plain
  text is seen simply as a linear sequence of characters, possibly
  interrupted by line breaks or page breaks".

  The text/plain media type does not restrict the character encoding;
  any character encoding may be used.  In the absence of an explicit
  character encoding declaration, US-ASCII [13] is assumed as the
  default character encoding.  This variability of the character
  encoding makes it impossible to count characters in a text/plain MIME
  entity without taking the character encoding into account, because
  there are many character encodings using more than one octet per
  character.

  The biggest advantage of text/plain MIME entities is their ease of
  use and their portability among different platforms.  As long as they
  use popular character encodings (such as US-ASCII or UTF-8 [12]),
  they can be displayed and processed on virtually every computer
  system.  The only remaining interoperability issue is the
  representation of line endings, which is discussed in Section 4.1.






Wilde & Duerst              Standards Track                     [Page 3]

RFC 5147            text/plain Fragment Identifiers           April 2008


1.2.  What Is a URI Fragment Identifier?

  URIs are the identification mechanism for resources on the Web.  The
  URI syntax specified in RFC 3986 [7] optionally includes a so-called
  "fragment identifier", separated by a number sign ('#').  The
  fragment identifier consists of additional reference information to
  be interpreted by the user agent after the retrieval action has been
  successfully completed.  The semantics of a fragment identifier are a
  property of the data resulting from a retrieval action, regardless of
  the type of URI used in the reference.  Therefore, the format and
  interpretation of fragment identifiers is dependent on the media type
  of the retrieval result.

  The most popular fragment identifier is defined for text/html
  (defined in RFC 2854 [10]) and makes it possible to refer to a
  specific element (identified by the value of a 'name' or 'id'
  attribute) of an HTML document.  This makes it possible to reference
  a specific part of a Web page, rather than a Web page as a whole.

1.3.  Why text/plain Fragment Identifiers?

  Referring to specific parts of a resource can be very useful because
  it enables users and applications to create more specific references.
  Users can create references to the part they really are interested in
  or want to talk about, rather than always pointing to a complete
  resource.  Even though it is suggested that fragment identification
  methods are specified in a media type's MIME registration (see [15]),
  many media types do not have fragment identification methods
  associated with them.

  Fragment identifiers are only useful if supported by the client,
  because they are only interpreted by the client.  Therefore, a new
  fragment identification method will require some time to be adopted
  by clients, and older clients will not support it.  However, because
  the URI still works even if the fragment identifier is not supported
  (the resource is retrieved, but the fragment identifier is not
  interpreted), rapid adoption is not highly critical to ensure the
  success of a new fragment identification method.

  Fragment identifiers for text/plain, as defined in this memo, make it
  possible to refer to specific parts of a text/plain MIME entity,
  using concepts of positions and ranges, which may be applied to
  characters and lines.  Thus, text/plain fragment identifiers enable
  users to exchange information more specifically, thereby reducing the
  time and effort that is necessary to manually search for the relevant
  part of a text/plain MIME entity.





Wilde & Duerst              Standards Track                     [Page 4]

RFC 5147            text/plain Fragment Identifiers           April 2008


  The text/plain format does not support the embedding of links, so in
  most environments, text/plain resources can only serve as targets for
  links, and not as sources.  However, when combining the text/plain
  fragment identifiers specified in this memo with out-of-line linking
  mechanisms such as XLink [14], it becomes possible to "bind" link
  resources to text/plain resources and thereby "embed" links into
  text/plain resources.  Thus, the text/plain fragment identifiers
  specified in this memo open a path for text/plain files to become
  bidirectionally navigable resources in hypermedia systems such as the
  Web.

1.4.  Incremental Deployment

  As long as text/plain fragment identifiers are not supported
  universally, it is important to consider the implications of
  incremental deployment.  Clients (for example, Web browsers) not
  supporting the text/plain fragment identifier described in this memo
  will work with URI references to text/plain MIME entities, but they
  will fail to locate the sub-resource identified by the fragment
  identifier.  This is a reasonable fallback behavior, and in general,
  users should take into account the possibility that a program
  interpreting a given URI will fail to interpret the fragment
  identifier part.  Since fragment identifier evaluation is local to
  the client (and happens after retrieving the MIME entity), there is
  no reliable way for a server to determine whether a requesting client
  is using a URI containing a fragment identifier.

1.5.  Notation Used in This Memo

  The capitalized key words "MUST", "MUST NOT", "REQUIRED", "SHALL",
  "SHALL NOT", "SHOULD", "SHOULD NOT", "RECOMMENDED", "MAY", and
  "OPTIONAL" in this document are to be interpreted as described in RFC
  2119 [4].

2.  Fragment Identification Methods

  The identification of fragments of text/plain MIME entities can be
  based on different foundations.  Since it is not possible to insert
  explicit, invisible identifiers into a text/plain MIME entity (for
  example, as used in HTML documents, implemented through dedicated
  attributes), fragment identification has to rely on certain inherent
  properties of the MIME entity.  This memo specifies fragment
  identification using four different methods, which are character
  positions and ranges, and line positions and ranges, augmented by an
  integrity check mechanism for improving the robustness of fragment
  identifiers.





Wilde & Duerst              Standards Track                     [Page 5]

RFC 5147            text/plain Fragment Identifiers           April 2008


  When interpreting character or line numbers, implementations MUST
  take the character encoding of the MIME entity into account, because
  character count and octet count may differ for the character encoding
  being used.  For example, a MIME entity using the UTF-16 encoding (as
  specified in RFC 2781 [11]) uses two octets per character in most
  cases, and sometimes four octets per character.  It can also have a
  leading BOM (Byte-Order Mark), which does not count as a character
  and thus also affects the mapping from a simple octet count to a
  character count.

2.1.  Fragment Identification Principles

  Fragment identification can be done by combining two orthogonal
  principles, which are positions and ranges, and characters and lines.
  This section describes the principles themselves, while Section 2.2
  describes the combination of the principles.

2.1.1.  Positions and Ranges

  A position does not identify an actual fragment of the MIME entity,
  but a position inside the MIME entity, which can be regarded as a
  fragment of length zero.  The use case for positions is to provide
  pointers for applications that may use them to implement
  functionalities such as "insert some text here", which needs a
  position rather than a fragment.  Positions are counted from zero;
  position zero being before the first character or line of a text/
  plain MIME entity.  Thus, a text/plain MIME entity having one
  character has two positions, one before the first character (position
  zero), and one after the first character (position 1).

  Since positions are fragments of length zero, applications SHOULD use
  other methods than highlighting to indicate positions, the most
  obvious way being the positioning of a cursor (if the application
  supports the concept of a cursor).

  Ranges, on the other hand, identify fragments of a MIME entity that
  have a length that may be greater than zero.  As a general principle
  for ranges, they specify both a lower and an upper bound.  The start
  or the end of a range specification may be omitted, defaulting to the
  first or last position of the MIME entity, respectively.  The end of
  a range must have a value greater than or equal to the start.  A
  range with identical start and end is legal and identifies a range of
  length zero, which is equivalent to a position.

  Applications that support a concept such as highlighting SHOULD use
  such a concept to indicate fragments of lengths greater than zero to
  the user.




Wilde & Duerst              Standards Track                     [Page 6]

RFC 5147            text/plain Fragment Identifiers           April 2008


  For positions and ranges, it is implicitly assumed that if a number
  is greater than the actual number of elements in the MIME entity,
  then it is referring to the last element of the MIME entity (see
  Section 4 for details).

2.1.2.  Characters and Lines

  The concept of positions and ranges can be applied to characters or
  lines.  In both cases, positions indicate points between these
  entities, while ranges identify zero or more of these entities by
  indicating positions.

  Character positions are numbered starting with zero (ignoring initial
  BOM marks or similar concepts that are not part of the actual textual
  content of a text/plain MIME entity), and counting each character
  separately, with the exception of line endings, which are always
  counted as one character (see Section 4.1 for details).

  Line positions are numbered starting with zero (with line position
  zero always being identical with character position zero);
  Section 4.1 describes how line endings are identified.  Fragments
  identified by lines include the line endings, so applications
  identifying line-based fragments MUST include the line endings in the
  fragment identification they are using (e.g., the highlighted
  selection).  If a MIME entity does not contain any line endings, then
  it consists of a single (the first) line.

2.2.  Combining the Principles

  In the following sections, the principles described in the preceding
  section (positions/ranges and characters/lines) are combined,
  resulting in four use cases.  The schemes mentioned below refer to
  the fragment identifier syntax, described in detail in Section 3.

2.2.1.  Character Position

  To identify a character position (i.e., a fragment of length zero
  between two characters), the 'char' scheme followed by a single
  number is used.  This method identifies a position between two
  characters (or before the first or after the last character), rather
  than identifying a fragment consisting of a number of characters.
  Character position counting starts with zero, so the character
  position before the first character of a text/plain MIME entity has
  the character position zero, and a MIME entity containing n distinct
  characters has n+1 distinct character positions, the last one having
  the character position n.





Wilde & Duerst              Standards Track                     [Page 7]

RFC 5147            text/plain Fragment Identifiers           April 2008


2.2.2.  Character Range

  To identify a fragment of one or more characters (a character range),
  the 'char' scheme followed by a range specification is used.  A
  character range is a consecutive region of the MIME entity that
  extends from the starting character position of the range to the
  ending character position of the range.

2.2.3.  Line Position

  To identify a line position (i.e., a fragment of length zero between
  two lines), the 'line' scheme followed by a single number is used.
  This method identifies a position between two lines (or before the
  first or after the last line), rather than identifying a fragment
  consisting of a number of lines.  Line position counting starts with
  zero, so the line position before the first line of a text/plain MIME
  entity has the line position zero, and a MIME entity containing n
  distinct lines has n+1 distinct line positions, the last one having
  the line position n.

2.2.4.  Line Range

  To identify a fragment of one or more lines (a line range), the
  'line' scheme followed by a range specification is used.  A line
  range is a consecutive region of the MIME entity that extends from
  the starting line position of the range to the ending line position
  of the range.

2.3.  Fragment Identifier Robustness

  It is easily possible that a modification of the referenced resource
  will break a fragment identifier.  If applications want to create
  more robust fragment identifiers, they may do so by adding integrity-
  check information to fragment identifiers.  Such information is used
  to detect changes in the resource.  Applications can then warn users
  about the possibility that a fragment identifier might have been
  broken by a modification of the resource.

  Fragment identifiers are interpreted by clients, and therefore
  integrity-check information is defined on MIME entities rather than
  on the resource itself.  This means that the integrity-check
  information is specific to a certain entity.  Specifically, content
  encodings and/or content transfer encodings must be removed before
  using integrity-check information.

  Integrity-check information may specify the character encoding that
  has been used when creating the information, and if such a
  specification is present, clients MUST check whether the character



Wilde & Duerst              Standards Track                     [Page 8]

RFC 5147            text/plain Fragment Identifiers           April 2008


  encoding specified and the character encoding of the retrieved MIME
  entity are equal, and clients MUST NOT use the integrity check
  information if these values differ.  However, clients MAY choose to
  transcode the retrieved MIME entity in the case of differing
  character encodings, and after doing so, apply integrity checks.
  Please note that this method is inherently unreliable because certain
  characters or character sequences may have been lost or normalized
  due to restrictions in one of the character encodings used.

3.  Fragment Identification Syntax

  The syntax for the text/plain fragment identifiers is
  straightforward.  The syntax defines four schemes, 'char', 'line',
  and integrity check (which can either be 'length' or 'md5').  The
  'char' and 'line' schemes can be used in two different variants,
  either the position variant (with a single number), or the range
  variant (with two comma-separated numbers).  An integrity check can
  either use the 'length' or the 'md5' scheme to specify a value.
  'length' in this case serves as a very weak but easy to calculate
  integrity check.

  The following syntax definition uses ABNF as defined in RFC 5234 [9],
  including the rules DIGIT and HEXDIG.  The mime-charset rule is
  defined in RFC 2978 [5].

  NOTE:  In the descriptions that follow, specified text values MUST be
     used exactly as given, using exactly the indicated lower-case
     letters.  In this respect, the ABNF usage differs from [9].


  text-fragment   =  text-scheme 0*( ";" integrity-check )
  text-scheme     =  ( char-scheme / line-scheme )
  char-scheme     =  "char=" ( position / range )
  line-scheme     =  "line=" ( position / range )
  integrity-check =  ( length-scheme / md5-scheme )
                       [ "," mime-charset ]
  position        =  number
  range           =  ( position "," [ position ] ) / ( "," position )
  number          =  1*( DIGIT )
  length-scheme   =  "length=" number
  md5-scheme      =  "md5=" md5-value
  md5-value       =  32HEXDIG

3.1.  Integrity Checks

  An integrity check can either specify a MIME entity's length, or its
  MD5 fingerprint.  In both cases, it can optionally specify the
  character encoding that has been used when calculating the integrity



Wilde & Duerst              Standards Track                     [Page 9]

RFC 5147            text/plain Fragment Identifiers           April 2008


  check, so that clients interpreting the fragment identifier may check
  whether they are using the same character encoding for their
  calculations.  For lengths, the character encoding can be necessary
  because it can influence the character count.  As an example, Unicode
  includes precomposed characters for writing Vietnamese, but in the
  windows-1258 encoding, also used for writing Vietnamese, some
  characters have to be encoded with separate diacritics, which means
  that two characters will be counted.  Applying Unicode terminology,
  this means that the length of a text/plain MIME entity is computed
  based on its "code points".  For MD5 fingerprints, the character
  encoding is necessary because the MD5 algorithm works on the binary
  representation of the text/plain resource.

  To allow future changes to this specification to address developments
  in cryptography, implementations MUST ignore new types of integrity
  checks, with names other than 'length' and 'md5'.  If several
  integrity checks are present, an application can use whatever
  integrity checks it understands, and among these, those integrity
  checks that provide an appropriate trade-off between performance and
  the need for integrity checking.  Please see Section 4.3 for further
  details.

  The length of a text/plain MIME entity is calculated by using the
  principles defined in Section 2.1.2.  The MD5 fingerprint of a text/
  plain MIME entity is calculated by using the algorithm presented in
  [1], encoding the result in 32 hexadecimal digits (using uppercase or
  lowercase letters) as a representation of the 128 bits that are the
  result of the MD5 algorithm.  Calculation of integrity checks is done
  after stripping any potential content-encodings or content-transfer-
  encodings of the transport mechanism.

4.  Fragment Identifier Processing

  Applications implementing support for the mechanism described in this
  memo MUST behave as described in the following sections.

4.1.  Handling of Line Endings in text/plain MIME Entities

  In Internet messages, line endings in text/plain MIME entities are
  represented by CR+LF character sequences (see RFC 2046 [3] and RFC
  3676 [6]).  However, some protocols (such as HTTP) additionally allow
  other conventions for line endings.  Also, some operating systems
  store text/plain entities locally with different line endings (in
  most cases, Unix uses LF, MacOS traditionally uses CR, and Windows
  uses CR+LF).

  Independent of the number of bytes or characters used to represent a
  line ending, each line ending MUST be counted as one single



Wilde & Duerst              Standards Track                    [Page 10]

RFC 5147            text/plain Fragment Identifiers           April 2008


  character.  Implementations interpreting text/plain fragment
  identifiers MUST take into account the line ending conventions of the
  protocols and other contexts that they work in.

  As an example, an implementation working in the context of a Web
  browser supporting http: URIs has to support the various line ending
  conventions permitted by HTTP.  As another example, an implementation
  used on local files (e.g., with the file: URI scheme) has to support
  the conventions used for local storage.  All implementations SHOULD
  support the Internet-wide CR+LF line ending convention, and MAY
  support additional conventions not related to the protocols or
  systems they work with.

  Implementers should be aware of the fact that line endings in plain
  text entities can be represented by other characters or character
  sequences than CR+LF.  Besides the abovementioned CR and LF, there
  are also NEL and CR+NEL.  In general, the encoding of line endings
  can also depend on the character encoding of the MIME entity, and
  implementations have to take this into account where necessary.

4.2.  Handling of Position Values

  If any position value (as a position or as part of a range) is
  greater than the length of the actual MIME entity, then it identifies
  the last character position or line position of the MIME entity.  If
  the first position value in a range is not present, then the range
  extends from the start of the MIME entity.  If the second position
  value in a range is not present, then the range extends to the end of
  the MIME entity.  If a range scheme's positions are not properly
  ordered (i.e., the first number is less than the second), then the
  fragment identifier MUST be ignored.

4.3.  Handling of Integrity Checks

  Clients are not required to implement the handling of integrity
  checks, so they MAY choose to ignore integrity check information
  altogether.  However, if they do implement integrity checking, the
  following applies:

  If a fragment identifier contains one or more integrity checks, and a
  client retrieves a MIME entity and, using some integrity check(s),
  detects that the entity has changed (observing the character encoding
  specification as described in Section 3.1, if present), then the
  client SHOULD NOT interpret the text/plain fragment identifier.  A
  client MAY signal this situation to the user.






Wilde & Duerst              Standards Track                    [Page 11]

RFC 5147            text/plain Fragment Identifiers           April 2008


4.4.  Syntax Errors in Fragment Identifiers

  If a fragment identifier contains a syntax error (i.e., does not
  conform to the syntax specified in Section 3), then it MUST be
  ignored by clients.  Clients MUST NOT make any attempt to correct or
  guess fragment identifiers.  Syntax errors MAY be reported by
  clients.

5.  Examples

  The following examples show some usages for the fragment identifiers
  defined in this memo.

  http://example.com/text.txt#char=100

  This URI identifies the position after the 100th character of the
  text.txt MIME entity.  It should be noted that it is not clear which
  octet(s) of the MIME entity this will be without retrieving the MIME
  entity and thus knowing which character encoding it is using (in case
  of HTTP, this information will be given in the Content-Type header of
  the response).  If the MIME entity has fewer than 100 characters, the
  URI identifies the position after the MIME entity's last character.

  http://example.com/text.txt#line=10,20

  This URI identifies lines 11 to 20 of the text.txt MIME entity.  If
  the MIME entity has fewer than 11 lines, it identifies the position
  after the last line.  If the MIME entity has less than 20 but at
  least 11 lines, it identifies the range from line 11 to the last line
  of the MIME entity.

  https://example.com/text.txt#line=,1

  This URI identifies the first line.  Please note that the URI scheme
  has been changed to https.

  ftp://example.com/text.txt#line=10,20;length=9876,UTF-8

  As in the second example, this URI identifies lines 11 to 20 of the
  text.txt MIME entity.  The additional length integrity check
  specifies that the MIME entity has a length of 9876 characters when
  encoded in UTF-8.  If the client supports the length scheme, it may
  test the retrieved MIME entity for its length, but only if the
  retrieved MIME entity uses the UTF-8 encoding or has been locally
  transcoded into this encoding.






Wilde & Duerst              Standards Track                    [Page 12]

RFC 5147            text/plain Fragment Identifiers           April 2008


  Please note that the FTP protocol, as well as some other protocols
  underlying some other URI schemes, do not provide explicit
  information about the media type of the resource being retrieved.
  Using fragment identifiers with such URI schemes is therefore
  inherently unreliable.  Current user agents use various heuristics to
  infer some media type for further processing.  Processing of the
  fragment identifier according to this memo is only appropriate if the
  inferred media type is text/plain.

6.  IANA Considerations

  IANA has added a reference to this specification in the text/plain
  Media Type registration.

7.  Security Considerations

  The fact that software implementing fragment identifiers for plain
  text and software not implementing them differs in behavior, and the
  fact that different software may show documents or fragments to users
  in different ways, can lead to misunderstandings on the part of
  users.  Such misunderstandings might be exploited in a way similar to
  spoofing or phishing.

  In particular, care has to be taken if fragment identifiers are used
  together with a mechanism that allows showing only the part of a
  document identified by a fragment.  One scenario may be the use of a
  fragment identifier to hide small-print legal text.  Another scenario
  may be the inclusion of site-key-like material, which may give the
  user the impression of using the real site rather than a fake site;
  other scenarios may also be possible.  Possible countermeasures may
  include but are not limited to displaying the included content within
  clearly visible boundaries and limiting inclusion to material from
  the same security realm or from realms that give explicit permission
  to be included in another realm.

  Please note that the above issues all apply to the client side;
  fragment identifiers are not used when resolving a URI to retrieve
  the representation of a resource, but are only applied on the client
  side.

  Implementers and users of fragment identifiers for plain text should
  also be aware of the security considerations in RFC 3986 [7] and RFC
  3987 [8].








Wilde & Duerst              Standards Track                    [Page 13]

RFC 5147            text/plain Fragment Identifiers           April 2008


8.  References

8.1.  Normative References

  [1]   Rivest, R., "The MD5 Message-Digest Algorithm", RFC 1321,
        April 1992.

  [2]   Freed, N. and N. Borenstein, "Multipurpose Internet Mail
        Extensions (MIME) Part One: Format of Internet Message Bodies",
        RFC 2045, November 1996.

  [3]   Freed, N. and N. Borenstein, "Multipurpose Internet Mail
        Extensions (MIME) Part Two: Media Types", RFC 2046,
        November 1996.

  [4]   Bradner, S., "Key words for use in RFCs to Indicate Requirement
        Levels", BCP 14, RFC 2119, March 1997.

  [5]   Freed, N. and J. Postel, "IANA Charset Registration
        Procedures", BCP 19, RFC 2978, October 2000.

  [6]   Gellens, R., "The Text/Plain Format and DelSp Parameters",
        RFC 3676, February 2004.

  [7]   Berners-Lee, T., Fielding, R., and L. Masinter, "Uniform
        Resource Identifier (URI): Generic Syntax", STD 66, RFC 3986,
        January 2005.

  [8]   Duerst, M. and M. Suignard, "Internationalized Resource
        Identifiers (IRI)", RFC 3987, January 2005.

  [9]   Crocker, D., Ed. and P. Overell, "Augmented BNF for Syntax
        Specifications: ABNF", STD 68, RFC 5234, January 2008.

8.2.  Informative References

  [10]  Connolly, D. and L. Masinter, "The 'text/html' Media Type",
        RFC 2854, June 2000.

  [11]  Hoffman, P. and F. Yergeau, "UTF-16, an encoding of ISO 10646",
        RFC 2781, February 2000.

  [12]  Yergeau, F., "UTF-8, a transformation format of ISO 10646",
        STD 63, RFC 3629, November 2003.

  [13]  ANSI X3.4-1986, "Coded Character Set - 7-Bit American National
        Standard Code for Information Interchange", 1986.




Wilde & Duerst              Standards Track                    [Page 14]

RFC 5147            text/plain Fragment Identifiers           April 2008


  [14]  DeRose, S., Maler, E., and D. Orchard, "XML Linking Language
        (XLink) Version 1.0", World Wide Web Consortium Recommendation,
        June 2001, <http://www.w3.org/TR/xlink/>.

  [15]  Freed, N. and J. Klensin, "Media Type Specifications and
        Registration Procedures", BCP 13, RFC 4288, December 2005.













































Wilde & Duerst              Standards Track                    [Page 15]

RFC 5147            text/plain Fragment Identifiers           April 2008


Appendix A.  Acknowledgements

  Thanks for comments and suggestions provided by Marcel Baschnagel,
  Stephane Bortzmeyer, Tim Bray, Iain Calder, John Cowan, Spencer
  Dawkins, Lisa Dusseault, Benja Fallenstein, Ted Hardie, Sam Hartman,
  Sandro Hawke, Jeffrey Hutzelman, Cullen Jennings, Graham Klyne, Dan
  Kohn, Henrik Levkowetz, Chris Newman, Mark Nottingham, Conrad Parker,
  and Tim Polk.

Authors' Addresses

  Erik Wilde
  UC Berkeley
  School of Information, 311 South Hall
  Berkeley, CA 94720-4600
  U.S.A.

  Phone: +1-510-6432253
  EMail: [email protected]
  URI:   http://dret.net/netdret/


  Martin Duerst (Note: Please write "Duerst" with u-umlaut wherever
                possible, for example as "D&#252;rst" in XML and HTML.)
  Aoyama Gakuin University
  5-10-1 Fuchinobe
  Sagamihara, Kanagawa  229-8558
  Japan

  Phone: +81 42 759 6329
  Fax:   +81 42 759 6495
  EMail: [email protected]
  URI:   http://www.sw.it.aoyama.ac.jp/D%C3%BCrst/


















Wilde & Duerst              Standards Track                    [Page 16]

RFC 5147            text/plain Fragment Identifiers           April 2008


Full Copyright Statement

  Copyright (C) The IETF Trust (2008).

  This document is subject to the rights, licenses and restrictions
  contained in BCP 78, and except as set forth therein, the authors
  retain all their rights.

  This document and the information contained herein are provided on an
  "AS IS" basis and THE CONTRIBUTOR, THE ORGANIZATION HE/SHE REPRESENTS
  OR IS SPONSORED BY (IF ANY), THE INTERNET SOCIETY, THE IETF TRUST AND
  THE INTERNET ENGINEERING TASK FORCE DISCLAIM ALL WARRANTIES, EXPRESS
  OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO ANY WARRANTY THAT THE USE OF
  THE INFORMATION HEREIN WILL NOT INFRINGE ANY RIGHTS OR ANY IMPLIED
  WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY OR FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.

Intellectual Property

  The IETF takes no position regarding the validity or scope of any
  Intellectual Property Rights or other rights that might be claimed to
  pertain to the implementation or use of the technology described in
  this document or the extent to which any license under such rights
  might or might not be available; nor does it represent that it has
  made any independent effort to identify any such rights.  Information
  on the procedures with respect to rights in RFC documents can be
  found in BCP 78 and BCP 79.

  Copies of IPR disclosures made to the IETF Secretariat and any
  assurances of licenses to be made available, or the result of an
  attempt made to obtain a general license or permission for the use of
  such proprietary rights by implementers or users of this
  specification can be obtained from the IETF on-line IPR repository at
  http://www.ietf.org/ipr.

  The IETF invites any interested party to bring to its attention any
  copyrights, patents or patent applications, or other proprietary
  rights that may cover technology that may be required to implement
  this standard.  Please address the information to the IETF at
  [email protected].












Wilde & Duerst              Standards Track                    [Page 17]