Re: Link-4: Extended Linking Group Indirection

On Sun, 18 May 1997 05:39:04 -0400 (EDT) Tim Bray said:
>Suppose I read a doc, and it's got an XLG, which causes me to read another,
>and it has an XLG too, that is different?  Do I go on following the XLG
>chain forever?  HyTime, whose BOS concept is related, has a BOSlength
>or some such parameter.  Things we could do in XML include:
>
>1. Saying nothing, and let processors work it out
>2. Saying that XLG's should only be followed one step
>3. Saying that XLG's should be followed for two steps.  Huh?  This actually
>   makes some sense - you could have N docs each having a single-entry
>   XLG pointing at the N+1th doc, which works as a hub document.
>4. Defining an XML-XLG-COUNT attribute that says how many steps
>   the doc author thinks a processor should chain out, in order to
>   build the appropriate set of links.

I'm with Chris Maden, in favor of (1).  I think the spec should say
more explicitly than it does (but sorry, I don't have wording) that
a GROUP element serves as a signal to the application that there are
(or may be) links involving the current document, whose existence
is asserted in the documents referred to by the enclosed
DOCUMENT elements.

Given the confusion that has reigned over the question, perhaps the
spec should also mention explicitly in passing that those links may
take the form either of n-way links (EXTENDED) or simple links
(SIMPLE).

I'm inclined to think we should *not* need to say "A browser might
invite the user to specify which of the documents listed, if any,
should be read by the browser in order to discover links into the
current document."  That seems an obvious behavior to me, but it's
probably too obvious to need mentioning -- unless of course it's not
obvious at all, in which case it may not be as good an idea as I thought.

-C. M. Sperberg-McQueen

Received on Thursday, 22 May 1997 18:46:20 UTC