RE: Hypermedia - Why

On Fri, 2012-07-27 at 15:48 +0000, Rushforth, Peter wrote:
> > http://www.balisage.net/Proceedings/vol3/html/Quin01/BalisageVol3-Quin01.html
> >
> > As I mentioned to him, the mechanism would not require a specific
> > change to the xml: namespace, but could be accomplished with the
> > application of the hypermedia vowels in the xml: namespace.  Everybody
> > wins!
> [Liam wrote:]
> The proposal didn't get traction from the HTML world at all,
> unfortunately, and since my main goal was to make a concession to Web
> browser makers in order to achieve distributed extensibility in a
> compatible way, I let it drop.
> [Peter replied:]
> Well, that, and you can't go polluting the xml namespace for a trifle like HTML-compatible distributed extensibility ;-).

Please do to try and get quoting right...

It was not at all about "polluting".

XML is almost always converted to another format before display by a Web
browser, though, and Web browsers today are not going to interpret any
attribute at all on a non-HTML XML element as a link, regardless of how
you spell it, and few people are likely to serve up non-HTML XML on the
Web and risk the resulting search-invisibility. For me, a way to say
"this attribute in a document you can't display or index would be
treated as a hypertext link, if you could display it and if people could
fin it" isn't enough of a way forward. And explicitly putting MIME
content types on link elements is definitely a huge, huge step backwards
away from Web architecture, although of course they would largely be
ignored by Web crawlers. But I won't preclude being persuaded
otherwise :)

I *do* think it's worth thinking about ways to represent and document
hypermedia, and declarative link discovery and presentation techniques.

Liam

-- 
Liam Quin - XML Activity Lead, W3C, http://www.w3.org/People/Quin/
Pictures from old books: http://fromoldbooks.org/
Ankh: irc.sorcery.net irc.gnome.org freenode/#xml

Received on Friday, 27 July 2012 16:48:39 UTC