Re: HTML Link Types [Was: Linking RDF]

Murray Altheim <altheim@eng.sun.com> wrote:

> The use of CDATA for %LinkTypes; was only an oversight, in that had the
> original designer thought to use NMTOKENS, this would have been more
> appropriate in the DTD. The design in the HTML 4 specification of link
> types is a list of tokens, not a list of URIs, so XHTML is merely a
> correction in this sense. You can find in the HTML 4 specification that
> the intention is explicitly tokens:
> 
> http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/types.html#type-links

I do not see this. The spec says:

    In the DTD, %LinkTypes refers to a space-separated list of link types.
    White space characters are not permitted within link types.

Nowhere does it say they must be XML names. Since space characters are not
allowed in URIs, use of URIs seems reasonable. The only issue is that URIs
are case sensitive, whereas LinkTypes are not. However, this issue can be
overcome by proper behavior on the part of the URI provider.

Since this added NMTOKENS restriction is new, could it be considered an
error in the spec? I think it should be, since it severely restricts the use
of LinkTypes.

-- 
[ Aaron Swartz | me@aaronsw.com | http://www.aaronsw.com ]

Received on Friday, 27 April 2001 14:08:29 UTC