Re: 1.4 a-c: Basic Terminology

At 11:09 AM 1/31/97 -0800, Tim Bray wrote:
>1.4.a What do we call the container used to hold the bits that
> point at other things?  (in current discussion: link)

I've been stewing on this a lot.  "Link" has the same problem that "marry"
does: two people can be married (linked), but a clergymember or justice of
the peace might also marry (link) them.  This ambiguity is driving me nuts.
 I've found an alternative that I can live with and doesn't require clever
adjectives: link (for in-line links) and association (for out-of-line
links).  Then, a "link" becomes a relationship between termini that's
expressed in an element at one of the termini, and an "association" becomes
a relationship between termini that's expressed in an element at some
neutral, non-terminus location.

>1.4.b What do we call the bits that point at other things? (in current
> discussion: pointer)

I agree that it's a good idea to distinguish pointer and address.  E.g., if
we end up allowing spans, and it takes two attributes ("startspan" and
"endspan") to do spans, I assume that each one contains an address; do the
two attributes together constitute the pointer?

>1.4.c What do we call the things that are pointed at? (in current 
> discussion: terminus)

Sure!  (I think I came up with this one.)

        Eve

Received on Sunday, 2 February 1997 18:04:31 UTC