a few comments

There's some great progress, but various points seem more confusing now than
they did in the last draft.

1: From "Introduction": "higher-level applications layered on XLink are
expected to specify their required rendering and processing treatments
separately." This is a great way to help focus XLink's role, and is a
sentence people should be coming back to repeatedly.

2: 1.3 The definitions of "link" and "resource" are pretty circular. (See
"circular definition" and "definition, circular" in the index of Knuth
volume 1--in early editions, they just pointed at each other.) It's not a
tight little loop, but the definitions for those, "linking element," and
"resource," and "locator" would be more helpful if they weren't so
interdependent.

3: 1.3 "local resource" The whole second sentence is confusing. Does
"regular" have a technical meaning here (cf. "regular expression")?

4: 3.1 Most of the spec refers to simple links as being different from
extended links, but the way extended links are defined simple links seem to
be a subset of extended links. ("arbitrary number of resources"--like 2?
"may be remote"--may be, but doesn't have to be; "some of the link's own
content can serve optionally as local resources, in which case the link is
inline.") I may be missing something, but if not, the relationship of simple
and extended links elsewhere in the spec (like 3.2 "The purpose of a simple
link is to be a convenient shorthand for the equivalent extended link...a
simple link could be represented by an extended link...") should be more
carefully worded to show that simple links are not different from extended
links but a subset of them.

5: 3.1 "The only kind of XLink that can be..." This is the only place that I
saw "XLink" used as a noun to refer to an XLink-conformant XML link.
Otherwise, as a noun, it refers to the XML Linking Language. I don't see
anything wrong with this, but I think the term deserves an entry in 1.3,
"Terminology" to clarify the potential meanings.

6: 3.1.1 Demonstrating the use of a foo element with "<foo>...</foo>"
doesn't tell us much about the use of a foo element. The examples for
xlink:resource and gpa don't add anything to the spec. They should be
fleshed out or deleted.

7: Issue (arc-semantics) "There's no sensible place to display the title
text..." Does it have to be about display? "Should we allow arc elements to
have roles and titles?" Yes. It fits in with the XLink philosophy of
enabling the description of resource relationships to be taken advantage of
by applications however they can or wish to.

8: Issue (Display-centric) "Can we motivate [the behavior attributes] in a
less display-centric way?" Just changing the word "show" to something else
would be a big step. "Action" perhaps? And change "actuate" to "cue" to
avoid action/actuate confusion?

Bob DuCharme          www.snee.com/bob           <bob@  
snee.com>  "The elements be kind to thee, and make thy
spirits all of comfort!" Anthony and Cleopatra, III ii

Received on Wednesday, 22 December 1999 15:25:53 UTC