XLink+HLink is one story not two

Part of the current discussion is that W3C should have one linking story not
two, so it is either/or between HLink and XLink.

First of all, that is not necessarily in W3C tradition. It has 2 styling
stories, 2 schema stories, 3 layout stories, 4 element selection stories.

But that notwithstanding, I don't think that XLink and HLink *are* different
stories: HLink was designed to tell the same story. See the abstract for
HLink:

    "HLink [...] extends XLink use to a wider class of languages than those
    restricted to the syntactic style allowed by XLink."

The idea is that you can define linking on markup languages using XLink
concepts, and you could even define XLink itself using HLink. It is not a
divergence from XLink, but an enrichment (at least that is the intent).

At the Linking BoF at the first W3C technical plenary in Boston, I made it
clear that the HTML WG is not opposed to there being an XLink namespace: for
certain uses it does its job just fine. It is just that we want a completer
solution that addresses more of the XLink requirements as originally
formulated. (http://www.w3.org/TR/NOTE-xlink-req/)

W3C seemed to commit itself to persuing this completer solution, and when it
didn't happen, we went and started it ourselves.

Steven Pemberton

Received on Friday, 27 September 2002 05:14:02 UTC