Re: two failings of XLink

I don't want to get flamed by any side in this discussion :-),
so will just say (carefully) that I don't have a view on the
big issues, but will mention an I18N aspect which *may* not
have been mentioned so far.

We find that wherever text (as opposed to an item from a set
of fixed values) is used, it is good for I18N to *allow*
elements to be used.  Various languages/scripts require markup,
eg for BiDi or Ruby (furigana).  This, obviously, doesn't fit
well with attribute values.

An ideal solution, I suppose, is one which allows those who
need markup to use elements and those who don't to use
attributes.

Misha


On 27/09/2002 19:53:12 Tim Bray wrote:
> On Friday, September 27, 2002, at 11:30 AM, Norman Walsh wrote:
> > The most common example I've seen is:
> >
> >   <img src="someURI" longdesc="someOtherURI"/>
> >
> > There are several ways to look at this.
>
> I have another take on this.  I've always thought the above was really
> bad markup design.  Because this is after all the *World Wide* web, and
> you might want your description in more than one language, and you
> might want to make audio versions available for the blind and so on.
> The XLink approach could be as follows (you could get by with less
> markup assuming some defaulting):
>
>   <img xlink:type="extended"
>    <src xlink:type="locator" xlink:href="someURI"/>
>    <src xlink:type="locator" lang="EN" xlink:href="desc-EN.html"/>
>    <src xlink:type="locator" lang="JP" xlink:href="desc-JP.html"/>
>    <src xlink:type="locator" xlink:title="Audio" lang="EN"
> xlink:href="desc-EN.wav"/>
>
> Now, "longdesc" is typically not used.  But if it were widely used, the
> XLink formulation seems like better markup to me.
>
> I also think that if Jane X. WebDweeb ran across this and thought the
> effect was cool, she'd do a "View Source" and figure out what was going
> on in about 2 minutes flat; but I guess that is the core of the
> disagreement.  -Tim
>



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Received on Friday, 27 September 2002 15:06:45 UTC