Re: Is XHTML a dead end?

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/ Jeni Tennison <jeni@jenitennison.com> was heard to say:
|> 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.

Right. The approach I outlined only works because HLink is described
in terms of elements and attributes. If it switched to a CSS-like
syntax, as has been discussed on xml-dev if not here, it would be
much, much harder to address with XSLT.

|> 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.

Something like that might work, but it seems *awfully* complex. I'd be
quite happy with a few fixed idioms (just a few more than are
currently available) tied to specific elements and attributes.

|> 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.)

Hmm. I can't find it now either. Maybe I read it somewhere else.
Sorry, no slander intended.

                                        Be seeing you,
                                          norm

- -- 
Norman.Walsh@Sun.COM    | Things work out best for those who make the
XML Standards Architect | best of the way things work out.
Sun Microsystems, Inc.  | 
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Received on Friday, 4 October 2002 06:21:13 UTC