[ trimmed distribution ] my .02 -

so, apart from the minor fixes, does anybody have an opinion about the prantheses vs. equals syntax issue?

Equals syntax is more URI-ish; it's easier to write a parser for correctly, and it's more likely that current code can be reused.

i also thought about adding a checksum facility (md5 or something along these lines), so that fragment identifiers could recognize a particular version of a resource. any opinions about this feature (it would be optional, so that applications would be allowed to ignore the checksum)?

The fragment identifier doesn't seem like a good place to put this functionality, IMHO. If people want to version their docs, they should have different URIs for them.