Re: What's a Referrer?

Terry Allen wrote about a point which puzzles me too: namely,

|   What's a Referrer?

In Section 4.2 the "implied location source" or "base address" for a
link element can have one of two fixed values, DOCELEM and REFERRER.
DOCELEM is the document element (of the document containing the link
element, one assumes): that's clear enough.  The REFERRER is "the
non-link element that refers to the link element", which is puzzling,
since in this scheme there's no apparent way for a non-link element to
make a meaningful reference to a link element.

My best guess on this is that the two sorts of base address we would
want to see in this scheme (at least as our first options, perhaps to
be supplemented by more) are really what the TEI extended pointer
language calls ROOT and HERE: ROOT meaning the document element (for
which this draft uses the attribute value DOCELEM), and HERE meaning
the place where the link element is (rather than the place where some
other element that somehow refers to it lives, which is what this
REFERRER seems to be).

If this is what's intended, or at least what makes sense as a
specification, then perhaps the values ROOT and HERE would also be
clearer than DOCELEM and whatever.  ("Document element" is not one of
those opaque or misleading SGML terms, but it is still less
self-evident to the masses than "root element", which is the gloss
that this draft provides.)

John Lavagnino
Women Writers Project, Brown University

Received on Wednesday, 29 January 1997 10:56:01 UTC