Re: CSS and XLink

At 02:58 AM 4/30/99 +0100, Ian Hickson wrote:
>It is my (very strongly held) opinion that path _traversal_ should be
>firmly in the XLink ball park. If it is not, then what, exactly, *is*?
>
>They don't take responsibility for formatting, behaviour, or
>traversal? What else is there? Consistent DTD fragments? If that is
>all there is, and its behaviour has to be defined in CSS anyway, then
>there is no _need_ for it. After all, there is no spec saying which
>element is going to be used to tag paragraphs in every XML language,
>so what is special about links?!
>
>Obviously, the one thing that _is_ special is path traversal...

I agree 100%, maybe 110%.  However...

The gist of the argument is that 'links' are about relationships, and not
about traversal paths.  In 'simple' links a unidirectional traversal path
is specified, for the sake of providing compatibility with HTML.  However,
'extended' links come with no such information, and programmers (including
style sheet developers) are expected to interpret the role and behavior
attributes to decide what traversal paths are possible within a link.

An extended and bitter debate on these issues took place on xlxp-dev, the
XLink mailing list, in December.  

Archives are available
at:http://www.fsc.fujitsu.com/hybrick/xlxp-dev/maillist.html

Some key threads:

W. Eliot Kimber: Style-based linking
http://www.fsc.fujitsu.com/hybrick/xlxp-dev/msg00131.html

David Durand: Re: XArc (harsh, but good explanation)
http://www.fsc.fujitsu.com/hybrick/xlxp-dev/msg00196.html

John Cowan: Three Models of Linking
http://www.fsc.fujitsu.com/hybrick/xlxp-dev/msg00201.html

David Durand: Thinking about Linking
http://www.fsc.fujitsu.com/hybrick/xlxp-dev/msg00217.html

If the current XLink model survives - describing only sets of resources,
and not the paths between them, it'll be up to style sheets or some other
yet-built mechanism to turn links into traversable paths.




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

Received on Friday, 30 April 1999 13:29:33 UTC