Re: XHTML & hyperlinking opinions (long, sorry)

Simon St.Laurent wrote:

> XLink is already written and made a Recommendation. Those political
> factors aside - 
> 
> What actually makes XLink a good fit for XHTML?  

Well, suppose I want to add multi-ended links to XHTML.  The kind of 
design I'd like would be real easy to explain to humans and to write 
software to recognize, it would allow me to decorate the links with 
titles and explanations and behavior/traversal suggestions, but those 
decorations would be optional, it would use subelements because that 
seems like a better design pattern for "repeating anythings" and is 
i18n-friendly.  It would come with some (optional) precooked behaviors 
inspired by the semantics of HTML today.    I'd worry a *lot* that when 
someone did a "View Source" they'd be able to figure out what they saw. 
    XLink qualifies on this set of criteria.

For external linkbases, I'd be terribly worried about heading down the 
slippery slope that (in my opinion) claimed HyTime, so I'd be brutally 
minimal, just re-use the existing link vocabulary and have one hardwired 
link type to bootstrap a search for external links.  The design would 
look a lot like XLink.

> Do any of those factors justify making it the only fit for XHTML?

No, but as I said, from those who aren't convinced, I would like to see 
counter-arguments of the form "multi-ended links aren't interesting" or 
"multi-ended links are interesting but here's a better way to do it."

> (Possible alternatives for such external linkbases, also already
> written, include RDF and XML Topic Maps.  Other alternatives include
> some kind of AF-like approach or a vocabulary created with explicit
> XHTML resonance.)

OK, if you think external linkbases are worth doing, let's see some 
examples of what they'd look like using some of these alternatives. -Tim

Received on Sunday, 6 October 2002 23:53:20 UTC