Re: 3.3 XML Analogue of HTML "<A"?

At 23:54 20/2/97 -0800, Tim Bray wrote:
>The ERB schedule calls for voting on Feb. 26 on these items.
>
>3.3.a Should we have a type of link that tries to be a nice clean superset of 
>HTML's Anchor?

Yes

>3.3.b If so, what should we call it? 

A - otherwise it (the element that is) is not a superset!

>3.3.c If 3.2.b goes the way of child elements for locators, should the "A" 
>link have a single child element for consistency with that, or no such 
>element for consistency with HTML? 

It must allow any element that is embeddable within an HTML anchor.

>3.3.d Should we regard such an "A" link as involving one or two resources? 

It is an in-line link. If it points to an internally named fragment
identifier it refers to a single resource. If it contains a URL prefix for
its fragment identifier, or consists of just the URL, there are two
resources, that doing the pointing and the pointed to.

>3.3.e If it involves two resources, is it a problem that there is no obvious 
>place to put locator metadata for the "implied" resource? 

Surely in-line links imply the contents of the link element as a resource.
>
>3.3.f SHould we provide a content model for "A" links? 

No - this has to be application specific

>3.3.g Should we allow "A" links to contain anything other than PCDATA? 

They must be able to contain any element the application wants.

There is one thing that seems to have been forgotten in the spec so far,
which is vital if we are to provide a superset of the HTML Anchor element.
That is the ability to map existing attribute names to XML ones. For example
you must be able to state that the XML locator attribute value is to be
taken from the href attribute (and perhaps that the name attribute is to be
mapped to an ID attribute)

For example, you need to have something like:

<?XML ATTLIST A xml-names="locator href id name caption #CONTENT>

so that the system knows that it should take the value of its XML locator
element from the contents of the href attribute, the contents of its unique
identifier from the name attribute (if it is present) and the content of its
caption attribute from the contents of the element).
----
Martin Bryan, The SGML Centre, Churchdown, Glos. GL3 2PU, UK 
Phone/Fax: +44 1452 714029   WWW home page: http://www.sgml.u-net.com/

Received on Monday, 24 February 1997 08:30:42 UTC