RE: Hypermedia - Why

On Fri, 2012-07-27 at 12:39 +0000, Rushforth, Peter wrote:
> David,

> Do you have a mechanism in mind?  I thought Liam's no namespace prefix
> namespaces idea might work.  
> 
> http://www.balisage.net/Proceedings/vol3/html/Quin01/BalisageVol3-Quin01.html
> 
> As I mentioned to him, the mechanism would not require a specific
> change to the xml: namespace, but could be accomplished with the
> application of the hypermedia vowels in the xml: namespace.  Everybody
> wins!

The proposal didn't get traction from the HTML world at all,
unfortunately, and since my main goal was to make a concession to Web
browser makers in order to achieve distributed extensibility in a
compatible way, I let it drop.

(my blog page with the details has also gone, but that's just about
hosting costs; I should put it back up somewhere else)


> >the fact that you could not model
> <img src="foo" longdesc="bar"/>
> >in xlink because it requires two URI on the same element was a _major_
> >reason for blocking the adoption of xlink in (X)HTML at the time.
> 
> I can see the need/desire to minimize markup, but longdesc does not seem to have won out in the end:
> http://www.w3schools.com/tags/att_img_longdesc.asp

That page is talking about support in Web browsers primarily or
exclusively targeted towards sighted people. The longdesc attribute is
widely used, although [D] is a popular alternative.

In any event I have no difficulty in imagining an XML element
participating in multiple links - e.g.
<word strongs="3056" form="nfs" fragment="20002" viewref="890"
oed="29124" xml:lang="gr">λόγος</word>

An HTML translation of this uses JavaScript to create a pop-up with an
extract from Strong's greek lexicon and a link to the full entry, a
part-of-speech diagram with a link to the grammatical information, and a
link to an image (with a thumbnail) of an early manuscript containing
the word.

All of these links (and more) are implicit in the markup, and I wouldn't
want to go changing my markup to something lower-level and harder to
work with.


> 
> I would think 
> <img src="foo"><link href="bar" rel="describedby"/></img>
> 
> might work too.

Not in any past or future version of HTML, alas. You can't take a "void"
element and give it content.

>  What we want here are some hypermedia
> > affordance vowels which reflect the architectural style of the web,
> > as we know it today, and that we can refer to in our vocabularies,
> > _by specification_, not schema.

I'm sorry, I'm still missing the motivation.

> >The HTML group at the time proposed an extended css declaration syntax
> as I recall as a counter-proposal to xlink.
> 
> >ah found it: "clink" eg this discussion
> 
> >http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-style/2004Mar/0060.html

As I recall from the time, the CSS WG was vehemently opposed to it.
Or at least some of them were.

But I think it's actually a sensible idea.

Liam

-- 
Liam Quin - XML Activity Lead, W3C, http://www.w3.org/People/Quin/
Pictures from old books: http://fromoldbooks.org/

Received on Friday, 27 July 2012 14:46:07 UTC