Re: two failings of XLink

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/ "Simon St.Laurent" <simonstl@simonstl.com> was heard to say:
| "One-URI per tag" is completely meaningless, so far as I can tell.
| "One-URI per element" makes far more sense.

Yes, and XLink does impose the limitation that only one attribute per
element can have the semantic of "hypertext reference". Maybe that's
an unacceptable limitation, but I've not yet seen convincing evidence.

The most common example I've seen is:

  <img src="someURI" longdesc="someOtherURI"/>

There are several ways to look at this. One way is that both src and
longdesc are hypertext references and therefore XLink is technically
insufficient to the task.

But I can look at it in at least two other ways:

1. The src attribute is an xlink:href. The longdesc attribute is a URI that
   points to some additional description. Not every URI has to have the
   semantic of xlink:href.

2. The longdesc attribute is itself an artifact of design constraints that
   were pragmatic rather than technically necessary. An alternative form
   of the link:

     <img src="someURI">
       <longdesc>
         <p>The long description of the link</p>
       </longdesc>
     </img>

   would have a number of advantages. The least of which being that XLink
   would suffice for the link attributes in this design.

                                        Be seeing you,
                                          norm

- -- 
Norman.Walsh@Sun.COM    | Wisdom is only a comparative quality, it will
XML Standards Architect | not bear a single definition.--Marquess of
Sun Microsystems, Inc.  | Halifax
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Received on Friday, 27 September 2002 14:30:54 UTC