Extended Link Groups Requirement

The only thing that doesn't seem to be in the new XLink requirements
document is the requirement corresponding to 'Extended Link Groups' from
the old working draft.

I think that especially where links are specified external to a document
there should be a way for the document to specify where these links are
located. For example a document might specify three other documents that
contain links to it.

A more complex solution might specify a set of documents (say all
documents at site www.foo.com ) which should be searched for links to
this document. This complexity may be unnecessary as a search engine
could be set to do this task and then make all the links available in a
single document which is pointed to by the original document.

I think that this is an important requirement not just from an
implementation point of view but from the perspective of filtering and
grouping links to a document. For example my document might point to two
link documents 'beginner' and 'expert'. The 'beginner' document might
contain links of a general informative nature to help a beginner
understand the original document. The 'expert' document might contain
links of a specific technical nature of interest to an expert in the
field. A browser could use this grouping to filter out one or other of
the link types according to the user's preference.

No doubt there are holes and un-thought-of implications in what I am
saying but it's worth thinking about. I have recently implemented a web
page annotation system using XLink concepts and I do actually use this
kind of filtering.

Regards

-- Philip

--------------------------------------------------------------
Philip Rutherford             E-mail: philipr@webdialog.com.au
webdialog pty. ltd.                http://www.webdialog.com.au
"working together on the web"
PO Box 131, Annandale NSW 2038, Australia.

Received on Tuesday, 23 March 1999 07:00:04 UTC