Re: Link indirection

At 04:33 PM 1/4/97 +0000, Peter Flynn wrote:
>   <urlloc id="bookrev">http://www.drmacro.com/bookrev</urlloc>
>   <P>
>   See <link linkend="bookrev">my book review site</link> for
>   a draft introduction to HyTime.
>
>I see two problems here: 
>
>   a. the current paradigm (however faulty or misleading) is that
>      element _content_ is destined for display/formatting: browser
>      authors will need a shift if they are to handle content which
>      gets used for some other purpose;
>
>   b. the extra level of indirection is going to be a major
>      stumbling-block for authors accustomed to HREFs.

The general architectural name remapping feature lets you map content to
attributes (and visa versa), so you can easily have this form of URLLoc:

<urlloc id="bookrev" href="http://www.drmacro.com/bookrev"/>

Which, in HyTime, would be declared like so:

<!ELEMENT URLLoc  EMPTY >
<!ATTLIST URLLoc
          ID       ID    #REQUIRED
          HREF     CDATA #REQUIRED
          HyTime   NAME  #FIXED "queryloc"
          notation (URL) #FIXED "URL"
          saimpsrc NAME  #FIXED "implicit"
          HyNames  CDATA #FIXED "#CONTENT HREF"
>

The "HyNames" attribute is mapping the content to the attribute named "HREF".

HyTime uses element content by default for things that might naturally be
attribute values for two reasons:

1. To avoid syntactic limitations on attribute values (length, primarily, 
   which I suppose isn't a problem with XML with effectively unbounded
   quantities).
2. To allow subelements (for example, dimspec, dimref, and markfun elements
   in extent specifications, which are nominally lists of integers).

HyTime uses the concept of "resources" to categorize those element types
that are only used by reference (and therefore, whose content, if any,
would not normally be displayed, certainly not at the location it occurred
in the source).

Cheers,

E.
--
W. Eliot Kimber (eliot@isogen.com) 
Senior SGML Consulting Engineer, Highland Consulting
2200 North Lamar Street, Suite 230, Dallas, Texas 75202
+1-214-953-0004 +1-214-953-3152 fax
http://www.isogen.com (work) http://www.drmacro.com (home)
"Rats in the morning, rats in the afternoon...if they don't go away, I'll be
re-educated soon..."                 --Austin Lounge Lizards, "1984 Blues"

Received on Saturday, 4 January 1997 15:26:44 UTC