generic uselessness (was Re: two failings of XLink)

Jeni Tennison writes:
> For what it's worth, I think that 'arcs' are the most problematic (and
> objectionable) aspect of adopting the extended link syntax. (Which
> isn't to say that I don't think there are other issues about using
> XLink, just to try to highlight this one.) Perhaps XLink could just
> drop them and we could use some other method (e.g. XML Events) to
> describe how and when resources were loaded.

That's very funny to me, since I consider extended links utterly useless
in multi-ended hypertext linking when arcs aren't present.  Sets are
nice for some applications, but if I'm presenting text to a user, it's
nice to know which resources are actually connected, and XML Events are
a hideous approach to doing that.

Maybe it's time to chuck the notion of generic linking altogether.  I
have a hard time arguing that anything in XML is generically useful any
more except for the basic syntax, which lets us apply some very handy
low-level tools like parsers and XSLT.  The rest (XLink, schemas, etc.)
has been a pointless trip into complexity.

-------------
Simon St.Laurent - SSL is my TLA
http://simonstl.com may be my URI
http://monasticxml.org may be my ascetic URI
urn:oid:1.3.6.1.4.1.6320 is another possibility altogether

Received on Friday, 27 September 2002 16:58:46 UTC