Re: XLink 1.1: behaviour of simple links without a show attribute

/ Jonathan Watt <jwatt@jwatt.org> was heard to say:
| I haven't received a response from the WG to the issue I raised below,
| but I see you're going to CR. Could I know the status of this issue
| please?

Apologies for the long delay in replying to your issue.

|> The current XLink 1.1 WD doesn't indicate clearly how conforming
|> XLink 1.1 applications should treat a simple link when the 'show' or
|> 'actuate' attributes are omitted (at least not in section 5.6
|> alongside the description of the attributes where clarification
|> would be most useful). For example, what behavior should result from:
|>
|>   <foo xlink:href="picture.gif">bar</foo>
|>
|> Should it be treated as if it had xlink:show="replace"? Or as if it
|> had xlink:show="embed"? Or perhaps it's intended to be unspecified
|> and left up to the XLink application to decide how to behave?

In the absence of any show attribute, the behavior is unconstrained by
XLink. This does mean that such links may not behave in uniformly
interoperable ways, though I imagine that most applications will treat
absence as synonymous with 'other' or 'none'.

[...]
|> I think both of those would be a good thing.

I don't disagree, but amending the semantics for show and actuate are
outside the scope of the XLink 1.1 effort.

                                        Be seeing you,
                                          norm

-- 
Norman Walsh
XML Standards Architect
Sun Microsystems, Inc.