Re: two failings of XLink

At 6:48 PM +0100 9/27/02, Jeni Tennison wrote:

>I don't know how a generic XLink processor would know that the
>alternative text should *not* be displayed if the (simple) <src> link
>has been embedded. Given that you're suggesting this tactic (of using
>simple links rather than extended ones), have you got any ideas about
>how a generic XLink processor would deal with a similar situations
>without having specialist XHTML knowledge?

A "generic XLink processor" isn't going to display anything. It does 
not have sufficient information, and probably isn't designed to 
display things. A generic browser might load a stylesheet and apply 
it to the document to figure out how to display it. An XSLT 
stylesheet could figure out which parts to expose and which not to. A 
CSS stylesheet could at least hide certain parts of the information. 
A browser without a stylesheet to depend on probably should just 
display everything including the markup, as IE does now, and let the 
user sort it out. And in that case, it's probably best to let the 
user select whichever link they want, and show them all rather than 
trying to pick between them.

>I believe that there are also some issues here on the XForms side that
>say that just because an XLink processor (talking harvester here)
>encounters an xlink:href doesn't necessarily mean it should navigate
>to the specified URL with a GET request, but I guess that's a
>different argument.
>

Perhaps that might be addressed by a robots processing instruction, 
but I'm not sure. I haven't looked at XForms that closely.
-- 

+-----------------------+------------------------+-------------------+
| Elliotte Rusty Harold | elharo@metalab.unc.edu | Writer/Programmer |
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|          XML in a  Nutshell, 2nd Edition (O'Reilly, 2002)          |
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|  http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN%3D0596002920/cafeaulaitA/  |
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Received on Friday, 27 September 2002 14:17:08 UTC