Some questions on HLink

Steven Pemberton wrote:
> XML has what you may call 
...
> HLink, just released, allows you to define this.
> http://www.w3.org/TR/hlink/

I read HLink in detail and had the following questions; quite likely 
others will as well so I might as well post them here.

- I note the Status of this Doc says "...does not imply endorsement ... 
of members of the HTML Working Group."  Since lots of W3C WDs do not 
carry this disclaimer, I wonder if it is just boilerplate or not. Could 
Steven or someone else from HTML WG expand on this a bit?  Is this a 
trial balloon, or something that the WG is pretty well agreed on?  I.e. 
is the default action that this shows up in XHTML 2.x?  I note there are 
open issues; does consensus exist outside of these?

- Just a quibble: I think what the WD labels as "implementations" would 
better be described as "declarative schemas" or "formal descriptions" or 
some such.  Or am I missing something?

- Is there any write-up anywhere of how this differs from the ISO 
Architectural Forms framework?

- There's a formatting problem: I assume that the possible values of 
"effect" are new, replace, embed, submit, and map?

- The definition of the "replacement" attribute uses the undefined term 
"environment"; the (only) example in 2.3.1 shows that this is, in the 
HTML context, a frame.  I'm trying to imagine portable non-HTML uses of 
this attribute.  Are there any in mind?

- It might be the case that in some circumstances you might want to 
design a multi-ended link using subelements rather than attributes to 
carry the URIs and so on (as in the XLink extended links).  HLink (if I 
read it right) limits you to using attributes for this.  Is there any 
thought to extending this to element-based designs?

- On section 3, would you envision that in some subsequent version of 
XHTML, the "a href=" element would have no linking effect unless the 
hlinks are explicitly included in or referenced from the document?

  -Tim

Received on Monday, 16 September 2002 13:45:48 UTC