Re: Is XHTML a dead end?

Hi Norm,

> Eric V. posted a stylesheet to do some XLink processing recently. It
> contained lots of very generic matches (match="*" and match="@*").
> Templates of that sort are problematic if you want to build a
> stylesheet that can be extended, so let's look at a different
> example.

(Interesting how this relates to our discussion on XML-Dev about
type-based matching.)

> I did find a few HLink questions when I was writing this:
>
> 1. How does one do titles?
> 2. It appears that hlink supports elements from any namespace, but
>    it doesn't support namespace qualified attributes. (i.e., there's a
>    namespace/element pair on hlink, but there's no locator-namespace for
>    the locator attribute.

I definitely think that the selector aspects of HLink require more
work. To be really versatile, they need to be more along the lines of
XSLT patterns or CSS selectors. But doing that would have a *major*
impact on whether you could use XSLT (in the way that you demonstrated
in your email) to do it, since XSLT lacks functions for dynamically
evaluating XPaths or matching patterns.

> 3. I think the "onRequestSecondary" is dreadful. Surely there need to be
>    tertiary, etc. methods if there need to be secondary methods.

This is why I keep wibbling about XML Events. To get real flexibility
so that users can precisely indicate what kind of "event" triggers a
particular link, you need something at the XML Events level. This
might be hideous, but perhaps HLink needs a bit of indirection --
something like having the actuate attribute take an IDREF that points
to a "behaviour specification" further down that describes, at an
event level, what activates the link. I dunno whether this even
*belongs* in HLink.

> 4. Prohibiting nested links is silly.

I scanned through HLink but I couldn't see anything about nested
links? (XLink doesn't *ban* them of course, just says that they don't
necessarily mean anything to an XLink processor.)

Anyway, I'd see HLink more as a way of raising the questions about
link specifications than as a way of giving the answers. The first
hurdle is recognising the requirement for something other than (or as
well as) XLink.

Cheers,

Jeni

---
Jeni Tennison
http://www.jenitennison.com/

Received on Friday, 4 October 2002 05:34:23 UTC