xlink:href

TBL says:

> You should use xlink
>     whenever your application is one of hypertext linking,
>     as xlink functionality such as power to control user
>     interface behavior on link traversal is useful and
>     should be implemented in a standard way to allow
>     interoperability.

I do not encourage people to use XLink for a few reasons. 

First, I feel that it is too syntactically intrusive. The same goes for
RDF and SOAP. People authoring XML should not need to keep six different
namespaces in their head.

Also, I do not think that a particularly rich or interesting layer of
software has evolved to support XLinks that can do meaningful things
with them without understanding the rest of the application. Under what
circumstances would I care that when a link is clicked it brings up a
new window but not care whether the surrounding <para> elements are
represented as paragraphs? XML on the Web is almost always transformed
from a local vocabulary to a display vocabulary (whether that
transformation happens on the client or server). Why must hypertext
links get special handling?

XLink might be a little bit more interesting if it was used everywhere
one XML element referenced another (e.g. <xsd:include>, <xsl:import>,
....). Then it could be used as the basis for link checking and
validation. 

---
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  Open Source Conference: July 22-26, 2002,
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Received on Tuesday, 2 July 2002 09:18:37 UTC