- From: Kynn Bartlett <kynn-edapta@idyllmtn.com>
- Date: Tue, 3 Sep 2002 03:17:22 -0700
- To: Charles McCathieNevile <charles@w3.org>, Al Gilman <asgilman@iamdigex.net>
- Cc: WAI Cross-group list <wai-xtech@w3.org>
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 Next Book: Teach Yourself CSS in 24 http://cssin24hours.com Kynn on Web Accessibility ->> http://kynn.com/+sitepoint
Received on Tuesday, 3 September 2002 06:35:40 UTC