Re: proposal for this link/tspan discussion

"Dean Jackson" <dean@w3.org> wrote in message
news:20020820012308.GA18200@grorg.org...

> Why can't every element be a link? We allow an xlink:href
> on every element (I think this was one of the goals of xlink).

I agree it was, my concern with "any element" approach though is that
there are certain elements which should take a link to an external
resource with different semantics to the link in this sense, namely the
desc, metadata, foriegnObject elements (*) - desc I've requested before
the advantage of being able to link to an external resource describing
something, and there's the same issue with metadata.  These would clearly
be links to external resources (rather than the elements Dean lists which
currently use xlink:href for replaced content.) but they carry more
semantics than a normal a link.

> I'd like to see those attributes replaced with "ref".

XAG says use XLINK because it means XML applications without specific
namespace awareness can recognise that it is a link.  I'm undecided if
it's a good thing that these applications will no longer be able to know
that <image ref="somedocument.svg">  refers to another svg document or
not.

Jim.

* Is there some convention for writing elements, I don't like saying
<desc> element, as that's a tag, not an element, I capitalise in HTML,
but as we're case sensitive that's a problem...

Received on Tuesday, 20 August 2002 07:31:31 UTC