Re: XAG 2.3 and XLink

At 5:11 AM -0400 9/3/02, Charles McCathieNevile wrote:
>I don't see that your conclusion follows from your premise. It is clear that
>the HTML group doesn't want to use Xlink, and equally clear that the SVG
>group is happy to use it. SMIL 2 takes an intermediate position.
>
>It doesn't seem obvious to me that extended xlinks have been considered by
>anyone, and I am not sure why not. I don't yet see the evidence that we
>should either be trying to follow the community in an apparent condemnation
>of Xlink per se.

For the record, I'm in agreement with Charles on this, but then, I have
been wanting more XLink support (for accessibility's sake) for a long
time now.

>Which, as far as I can tell, comes down to an argument about whether things
>should be elements or attributes, and another argument about support for
>legacy formats. And from that perspective it seems to me a fairly esoteric
>architectural argument, so I would like to try and understand it in practical
>terms - what can't be done with Xlink, or is much harder with Xlink?

Legacy markup writing formats can be converted to XLink pretty
easily via simple rewriting.  I think XLink is a superior linking
mechanism to simple XHTML2 style links, and if someone really
wants to write in old-style links they could always author in that
limited language and convert it to "real" markup via XSLT or
some other mechanism.

I have never bought the "this is too hard to write because there
are too many elements!" argument.  If it's that hard, just don't
write raw XHTML2 -- write in some other language and convert.  (In
fact, that is generally sensible for nearly any XML-based language.)

The backwards compatibility argument from the HTML Working Group
is absurd, of course, given that XHTML2 is, by design, not backwards
compatible.

I am okay with a broader phrasing for XAG 2.3, although I would be
unhappy with any checkpoint in which the conclusion is "don't use
XLink."  That's just silly, in my opinion.

--Kynn

-- 
Kynn Bartlett <kynn@idyllmtn.com>                 http://kynn.com
Chief Technologist, Idyll Mountain            http://idyllmtn.com
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Received on Tuesday, 3 September 2002 06:35:40 UTC