XLINK, HLINK or neither? Possible new TAG issue

Martin Dürst mentioned, in response to the last call for the speech 
grammar draft, that there is a question as to whether for any URI 
parameter, xlink:href should be used.

There was a note in later discussions that the HTML working group are 
working on a "HLINK" spec for describing xlink functionality as a schema 
annotation level solution to thius, just as several times we have looked 
at schema annotation as a compromise between RDF syntax and no semantics 
at all.

For me this questions depends on whether the document type is a 
human-readable hypertext document, when  generic hypertext xml tools 
would benefit from knowing what is a link, and whether significance of 
the URI in question is a hypertext link or something different.

Maybe the TAG should give some direction in this area.

Tim BL