Re: Why not XHTML+RDF? was Re: Links are links

Hi Norm,

> No. Fair point. Using schemas to add defaulted attributes is exactly
> analogous to using DTDs for that purpose. But...I think it'll be a
> long time before schema processing is as widely deployed (or
> commonly performed) as DTD processing and much more centrally, I
> think the idea of basing this on some sort of schema annotation
> stuff (rather than defaulted attributes) is really unlikely to ever
> be widely deployed.

Yeah, well, the same goes for type annotations by schemas. Perhaps
XSLT 2.0 and XQuery will act as drivers for wide deployment of
Infoset annotations (I say with tongue in cheek).

> | Then maybe *simple* linking would be something to aim for? Like Paul
> | Prescod said:
> |
|>> But XLink is pretty near pessimal along all axes. If links are so
|>> important that they should be burned deep into the syntax then the
|>> appropriate namespace is "xml" and the specification should be VERY
|>> SHORT, VERY SIMPLE and VERY APPLICATION AGNOSTIC. Surely it isn't
>
> Simpler than my earlier example that *already works in my browser*?

Yes.

>   <phrase xlink:href="http://www.example.com/" xlink:type="simple">...</phrase>
>
> Yeah, the xlink:type attribute is a little unfortunate, but it could
> probably be made unnecessary be specifying that its default was
> 'simple' and its presence was implied by xlink:href.

Yep, that would help. Also getting rid of the necessity to declare the
XLink namespace would help -- which would mean putting this stuff in
the 'xml' namespace -- the new attributes that Micah suggested,
stating that 'xlink' is a prefix that never has to be explicitly
declared (Namespaces 1.1 is still a WD; now would be the time to do
that), or having some new prefix (maybe 'xmllink') that can be
attached on any attribute to turn it into a link, as Eric suggested.

Cheers,

Jeni

---
Jeni Tennison
http://www.jenitennison.com/

Received on Friday, 4 October 2002 07:50:34 UTC