Re: two failings of XLink

At 12:17 PM -0400 9/26/02, Simon St.Laurent wrote:


>The second issue is the only-one-URI-per-element rule.  While I can
>understand to some extent the arguments in favor of that from an
>abstract point of view, in practice it seems bizarrely limited if not
>simply broken.

There is no one-URI per element rule in XLink. there is a one-URI per 
tag rule. That'sa very different thing.

>XLink may be suitable for situations where the designers have a
>conception of linking that corresponds to XLink's existing structure and
>where mixing namespaces at the attribute level is accepted as a matter
>of course.
>
>Unfortunately, that does not appear to be the case with (X)HTML, which
>has a long history, a slightly different conception of hyperlink
>structures, and a user base of millions.  XLink appears to have chosen
>to ignore those understandings.

So has XHTML. As long as XHTML 2.0 intends to be backwards 
incompatible with classic HTML in ways completely unrelated to 
linking, this argument just doesn't hold water.
-- 

+-----------------------+------------------------+-------------------+
| Elliotte Rusty Harold | elharo@metalab.unc.edu | Writer/Programmer |
+-----------------------+------------------------+-------------------+
|          XML in a  Nutshell, 2nd Edition (O'Reilly, 2002)          |
|              http://www.cafeconleche.org/books/xian2/              |
|  http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN%3D0596002920/cafeaulaitA/  |
+----------------------------------+---------------------------------+
|  Read Cafe au Lait for Java News:  http://www.cafeaulait.org/      |
|  Read Cafe con Leche for XML News: http://www.cafeconleche.org/    |
+----------------------------------+---------------------------------+

Received on Thursday, 26 September 2002 12:49:04 UTC