remapping (was Re: Announcing HLink: rationale)

Tim Bray writes:
> Clearly there is overlap between HLink and the old ISO "architectural
> forms" technology.  If the consensus of the community is that they'd
> prefer to do attribute remapping of the kind Steven illustrates
> above, it's probably worthwhile investigating this overlap. Some time
> back David Megginson built an excellent lightweight XML-centric
> version of AFs with accompanying software that demonstrated very
> nicely.

I'd strongly encourage the W3C to take this approach to linking
seriously.  This kind of remapping seems fundamental to creating linking
systems that users would like to use (and which feel familiar), not just
linking systems that users have to use.

The transition from remappable-XLink to namespace-enforced-XLink may
have passed quietly in the chaos of the XLink development process, but
it seems like one of the more unfortunate results of the addition of
namespaces to XML and their perceived appropriate use.

HLink makes clear that annotations identifying equivalence are very
useful things, even in the presence of disambiguating identifiers.

This seems like a potent architectural issue worth some heavy
reflection, at least from this corner.


-------------
Simon St.Laurent - SSL is my TLA
http://simonstl.com may be my URI
http://monasticxml.org may be my ascetic URI
urn:oid:1.3.6.1.4.1.6320 is another possibility altogether

Received on Friday, 13 September 2002 20:19:11 UTC