Re: CSS and XLink

At 02:47 PM 4/27/99 +0200, Bert Bos wrote:
>Ian Hickson writes:
>
> > After studying the situation, it appears to me that all the required
> > ideas for doing this have already been put forward, and it is actually
> > only a matter of stitching them together.
>
>Thanks, Ian. I was just about to suggest that somebody present a
>proposal. The time seems ripe for attacking the behaviour of
>hyperlinks with a style sheet.

This discussion is off to an _excellent_ start, and I'm looking for time to
respond to it in detail.  I have one fairly major concern, which is that
we're addressing behavior quite well - even the EMBED issue - but we're
still sort of stuck in simple links.

One major issue in the current (ancient) XLink draft is that links can have
more that a startpoint and an endpoint.  Extended links are in fact sets of
points, with no description provided for the relationships between those
points beyond 'role' and 'behavior', which are left conspicuously
undefined.  The attitude on xlxp-dev seems to lean toward letting style
sheets figure out traversal paths - which points connect to which - and I'm
still trying to figure out how this could work with CSS.  Even XSL doesn't
seem to have taken on this task yet - see:

http://www.mulberrytech.com/xsl/xsl-list/archive/msg03970.html
and
http://www.mulberrytech.com/xsl/xsl-list/archive/msg03974.html)

Personally, of course, I'd like to see XLink handle traversal path
resolution, and then CSS would just have to deal with the results, but that
doesn't seem too popular with the XLink developers.  (As I have zero
official standing, I have no way to force the issue, either.)

Simon St.Laurent
XML: A Primer
Sharing Bandwidth / Cookies
http://www.simonstl.com

Received on Tuesday, 27 April 1999 13:17:16 UTC