Re: Why not XHTML+RDF? was Re: Links are links

Hi Norm,

> | Getting something that's easy for users to
> | include -- in their schema, in their CSS or wherever -- will be the
> | deciding factor.
>
> Maybe. A lot of folks have trouble with indirection, the
> overwhelming majority will never write a schema,

Do you think that the vast majority *will* write a DTD? This is one of
the things that I don't understand about objections to HLink on the
basis of too much indirection -- to use XLink properly, you really
have to have a DTD to add defaulted attributes to your document --
it's horribly messy if you don't. You don't avoid indirection by using
XLink, you just have indirection to a DTD rather than to anything
else. Now admittedly DTDs have the advantage of being built into XML
rather than layered on top, but it's still indirection.

> and I guess at the end of the day sophisticated linking is really
> just a "nice to have".

Then maybe *simple* linking would be something to aim for? Like Paul
Prescod said:

> But XLink is pretty near pessimal along all axes. If links are so
> important that they should be burned deep into the syntax then the
> appropriate namespace is "xml" and the specification should be VERY
> SHORT, VERY SIMPLE and VERY APPLICATION AGNOSTIC. Surely it isn't
> the case that links are "fundamental" to hypertext and somehow
> unimportant to database-style applications. They don't call it the
> "relational" model for nothing.

Cheers,

Jeni

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