Re: Hypermedia - Why

On 25/07/2012 13:33, Rushforth, Peter wrote:

>> If it is for encoding hypertext why is it important to have a
>> domain-agnostic markup for a link but not for a paragraph?
>
> <p/> you mean?  Isn't that domain-agnostic?

No. Not in the sense you were using the terms (if I understood them at
all). XML doesn't define any markup for paragraphs (p is defined in for
example xhtml) and it doesn't define any markup for links (href for
example is defined in xhtml).

You are suggesting moving the definition of links to a core xml
"domain-agnostic" layer rather than being defined in a specific
language such as xhtml.
What I don't see is why links are special. Why don't you want
to do that for paragraphs, or titles or any other part of hypertext?

If xml had xml:href what use could you make of a document if you did not
know what any of the elements meant but did know that some of the
attributes were hypermedia?

So you are given

<xxxxx xml:href="foo.bar">
<yyyy xml:tref="abc$3"/>
</xxxxx>

If you don't know the <xxxxx> means comment and the element should be
ignored, what use can you make of knowing that xml:href is a reference?

If you have to know what <xxxxx> means before you can interpret the
markup then you can only interpret the links if you already know the
domain language being used, in which case (as in XHTML) it would be
simpler if that language just defined href="foo.bar" or other markup
appropriate to that language.

Please take this as a real example, as I think I can't see how these xml
hypermedia attributes could be used unless they mean something in this case.


>
> If you mean, why would you need xml:href etc in a domain specific
> media type, the answer is, IME, because this part of the markup is
> specific to connections between web resources, and the
> infrastructure of the web is organized around connections between
> resources.
>
> So a web of data can contain any old data connected by
> connection-specific markup.
>
>>
>> There needs to be at least one use case where having this helps and
>> would work better (or even as well as) using xhtml and the link
>> markup.
>
> What link markup are you referring to?

any markup that should end up being specified by this CG.
>
> Peter

David


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Received on Wednesday, 25 July 2012 12:59:13 UTC