Re: [css3-hyperlinks] inclusion of Clink in next WD

> I assume you refer to the "dude, where's my IDs" problem?
> It is of course possible to point into XML (XHTML, SMIL, MathML, SVG,
> VoiceXML, etc if one knows where the IDS are by reading or cacheing
> the DTD or schema or by defining them in an internal DTD subset, and in
> practice there is a lot of linking to elements by ID in XML.
> The ID issue (for linking, CSS, and DOM) is orthogonal to which
> language is used to detect where the links are, of course.    
Note that I refered to stanalone documents where you have no notion of 
ID (unless you are ready to pollute document with internal DTD subsets) 
and as a result CSS id selectors, DOM getElementById and #target 
in links remain undefined. In any case this is separate issue.
> HyTime is a red herring in this context.
The point was that XLink is practically as awkward as HyTime.
> Which have the same
> problem as your CSS Clink example - it requires fetching and
> understanding a external file to discover where the links are.               
If browser supports markup language it does not require anything,
while if markup language is unknown or unsupported then browser needs
style sheet to display it and LinCSS are in that style sheet, so no
additional file is actually fetched for the sake of LinCSS.
Whether you like it or not in different markup languages links are
expressed in different way and
LinCSS could in some sense unify them. For me the whole point of 
XML + CSS approach is that browser can handle a lot of markup languages
without having native support for each of them and in this context
it's a great pity that LinCSS still remain outside CSS3.
Even in case of XHTML we have blockquote element with cite attribute
that is not link but user may want to display it as link or add link
before
blockquote using generated content.
> Which is fine as long as clients are the only things that process
> links. Since most people find most of their content by search engines,
> then links need to be trivially discoverable by search engines. 
If search engine decides to support some XML vocabulary like TEI 
it can follow its links too.

Received on Tuesday, 9 March 2004 07:26:02 UTC