Re: Radical cure for BOS confusion

At 12:11 AM 01/08/97 -0500, David G. Durand wrote:

>    I don't like the fixed linkset proposal very much, but if we did it
>with AFs we might be able to let people customize their ilinks. Trying to
>predefine that customization would just get in the way, I think.

This might work ok -- even something as simple as "here are the required
element types and attributes, and you can add any more you want, which have
application-specific semantics" -- which is trivial to do with architectural
forms.

One useful source for a list of what to include in one's links is a paper
Victor Riley did in the NIST hypertext standardization conference
proceedings -- still available from NIST (I'll try to dig up the document
number or get an MR copy from victor to post).
>
>    Personally I don't see that ilinks are that hard to process, nor that
>following a set of explicit companion links would be too arduous. In fact,
>I don't see that there's much difference between the fixed doctype proposal
>and the variable one -- we will still need some general way to recognize
>links in documents, so the only thing we really accomplish with the fixed
>proposal is to forcea segregation of ilinks -- we will still need to
>recognize other link types, and we will still need to process ilinks, and
>we will still need to fetch (at least 1) companion document. Once we go so
>far as that, why arbitrarily tie our own hands?
>
>    Let's face it ilinks are powerful. For the same reason, ilinks are hard
>to understand. This fundamental fact won't change if we add a few
>restrictions, I think.

Received on Wednesday, 8 January 1997 17:46:24 UTC