Re: clink/ilink direction (Was: anchor awareness)

[David Durand:]

| I see them [ilinks] as one of the really critical points of
| expansion for web functionality, since ilinks can be applied by
| anyone, to anything, without difficulty. In particular, if users
| wish to customize the web by adding useful navigation that meets
| their needs, they need merely instruct their browser to maintain
| an "ilink file" that will hold the links they choose to create,
| and enable them to be displayed in context. Such files could also
| be shared via the web, of course.

I think that there is general agreement that ilinks are highly
desirable.  The question is whether enabling ilinks requires the
application to know the entire grove, which in the general case would
mean knowing the entire Web as a grove.  Steve and Eliot seemed to be
saying that it would be necessary for the application to know the
grove; you seem to be saying that it would not.

| I don't yet see any reason that ilinks should not be
| implemented. The issue of how software should be instructed to
| find ilinks to interpret relative to documents being processed is
| not really our problem (except for ilinks within one of the
| documents that they link).

If I were an implementor I would say that this is handwaving.  Given
the depths of difficulty we have glimpsed during this discussion, I
don't think it will be very convincing to say that finding ilinks is
not our problem.  It seems to me that finding ilinks is exactly our
problem.

Jon

Received on Friday, 27 December 1996 16:10:22 UTC