Re: Generic link handling

On Thursday, November 28, 2002, 1:31:05 AM, Paul wrote:


PP> The Web has profited greatly by the existence of tools that can follow 
PP> links from resource to resource without necessarily understanding all of 
PP> the semantics of the relationship. Google is the most obvious example 
PP> but it is not the only spider out there. There are also tools that allow 
PP> link checking, site replication, link visualization, and so forth.

PP> In W3C specifications there are a variety of ways to link. HTML alone 
PP> uses several different attribute names. SOAP uses a bare-name convention 
PP> (even on elements in other namespaces). XLink is supposed to be used 
PP> across XML vocabularies but only vocabularies that are "document-like". 
PP> RDF uses another convention. XSLT and XML Schema link to inclusions 
PP> using yet another convention.

PP> Does anybody else see this as a problem? Is it a TAG issue? An xml-core 
PP> issue? xml:href anybody? Is XLink supposed to be the solution? If not, 
PP> why not?

Hi Paul,

Yes its a problem.

Part of the issue is that some folks do not reliably distinuish
between an attribute of type anyURI, which there can be lots of per
element, and a link (which can have only one such attribute that forms
the link URI, if there is to be any metadata also associated with
that link  using standard and readily recognisable attribute names).


-- 
 Chris                            mailto:chris@w3.org

Received on Friday, 29 November 2002 06:28:01 UTC