Re: [css3-hyperlinks] inclusion of Clink in next WD

On Mon, 8 Mar 2004, Boris Zbarsky wrote:
> 
> > This, as opposed to XLink, which is heavily complicated 
> People keep saying this.... but the XLink equivalent of "make this node a link
> to X" is very very simple, in fact.
Yes, but there is one important psychological factor, even if simple
xlinks
are really simple webmaster encounters new not too simple language Xlink
(more precisely even three new languages XLink, Xpointer, XPath). Note
also that even simple Xlinks are not really so simple, for instance if you
need to make link that points to some part of standalone XML doc you
can't use id and need to use XPath. So Xlink in my opinion will not be
used by webmasters (as for instance they don't use HyTime linking
language).

However apart of convenience, main advantage of CSS linking extensions is
better flexibility. Consider for instance markup
<element url="http://sample.com/sample.png">PNG Image</element>
You can display it as link to png image using CSS hyperlink extensions,
you can without changing markup display image itself using CSS generated
content and finally you can display just url to image or content of
element again using generated content. Can you achieve it with XLink?
No, Xlink is dumb language that lacks flexibility and is not extensible.
Another issue that I mentioned previously on this list is that CSS linking
extensions are invaluable in default style sheets for XML based languages
that have they own linking mechanism (XHTML, DocBook, TEI and many
others). Here Xlink simply can't effectively replace CSS linking
extensions (please don'to suggest me to use HLink + XLink + XPointer +
XPath for things that can be done in much more simple and elegant way).

Thus I vote for CSS hyperlinks that provide more convenient, more
flexible and more aesthetical linking mechanism then that we currently
have. I use it for several years in Opera and I would like to see this
functionality it CSS3.

Received on Tuesday, 9 March 2004 03:31:38 UTC