Fragment identifiers for plain text files

Hypermedia systems like the Web heavily depend on their ability to link resources. One of the key features of the Web's URIs is their ability to not only specify a resource, but to also identify a subresource within that resource, by using a fragment identifier. Fragment identification enables user to create better hypermedia. We present a proposal for fragment identifiers for plain text files, which makes it possible to identify character or line ranges, or subresources identified by regular expressions. Using these fragment identifiers, it is possible to create more specific hyperlinks, by not only linking to a complete plain text resource, but only the relevant part of it. Along with this proposal, a prototype implementation is described which can be used both as a server-side testbed and as a client-side extension for the Firefox browser.