Hyperlink behavior

   We must have similar clocks. When I sat down this morning, I knew that
wanted to post a little things on Hyperlinks for XML, and then Tim's mail
was waiting when I started up!

   The basic list is good, though I second Martin's comment -- we should
not depend on the presence of IDs in documents, if indexing of read-only
material is a goal.

   I must, unfortunately, disclaim knowledge of the new HyTime stuff --
I've not had a chance to look at it because all my markup-related time has
been taken up with XML.

   We need to add a level of abstraction to HyTime and ensure that the
specification of behavior of links is in the style sheet, and not in the
document markup. We owe it to hypertext to implement what we know about
declarative markup. And that means that we need "declarative linking"; the
behavior of links must be separated from their pointing functions, and the
document instance. As we separate document structure (markup)  and document
rendering (style sheets), we must separate link structure from link
behavior . Link structure essentially associates some document parts with
some metadata describing their relations (linktypes, and anchor roles).
Link rendering associates the relations with behaviors. For example: travel
to role x, when role y is clicked, pop up a menu of possible endpoints,
visit endpoints in sequence, copy destination text to this location on
demand (transclude), etc.

We should be as simple as possible with this link-style language. I don't
know if we can get away with just adding some stuff to DSSSL. We may also
need to think about Javascript in this regard (It's a sloppy job, in my
experience, but the implementations are there, so we may be better off with
it even given its many many flaws)

   -- David

I am not a number. I am an undefined character.
_________________________________________
David Durand              dgd@cs.bu.edu  \  david@dynamicDiagrams.com
Boston University Computer Science        \  Sr. Analyst
http://www.cs.bu.edu/students/grads/dgd/   \  Dynamic Diagrams
--------------------------------------------\  http://dynamicDiagrams.com/
MAPA: mapping for the WWW                    \__________________________

Received on Friday, 20 December 1996 10:38:51 UTC