Re: two failings of XLink

At 3:01 PM -0400 9/26/02, Simon St.Laurent wrote:

>>  But you don't have to use extended XLinks if you don't want to.
>>  Multiple simple XLinks solve HTML's needs just fine.
>
>Multiple simple XLinks require multiple elements, which was my original
>point.  You claimed it was just "extra tags", but tags have a tendency
>to define elements.
>

That's OK with me. One empty-element tag per link required. I see no 
problem with this whatsoever. It's *marginally* more verbose than the 
current syntax. However, it's also more extensible and cleaner. Early 
HTML tried to put way too much into attributes.

One thing I've learned in XML-land is that if there's any doubt about 
whether something should be an attribute or an element, it's almost 
always better off as an element, and much of the time when there's no 
doubt that something needs to be an attribute, it's still turns out 
to be better off as an element in the long run.
-- 

+-----------------------+------------------------+-------------------+
| 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/  |
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|  Read Cafe au Lait for Java News:  http://www.cafeaulait.org/      |
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Received on Thursday, 26 September 2002 15:48:00 UTC