Re: Hlink, CSS anyone?

Hi Didier,

> An XHTML document could be transformed for rendition with an XSLT
> style sheet or with a CSS style sheet. This transformation establish
> a one to one mapping of certain elements/attributes into visual
> objects.

Presumably you're talking about an XSLT transformation from XHTML into
XSL-FO? Or are you talking about a transformation from XHTML into
XHTML+XLink which can then be displayed using CSS or processed by an
XLink processor?

Personally, I'm very much in favour of specifying a processing model
in which an XLink processor, on encountering an XML document, attempts
to locate (through whatever means) a transformation (in whatever
language) that can change that XML document into one that uses XLink,
and then does whatever it wants to do with the result of that
transformation.

I think that would allow users to express linking semantics in
whatever way they want while retaining the standard semantics defined
by XLink. When I suggested this on XML-Dev [1], though, I got the
impression that others thought this was a ridiculous suggestion
because:

  (a) XSLT and other transformation technologies are not sufficiently
      widespread be relied upon
  (b) it would mean specifying a processing model for XML documents
  (c) the problem could be solved in other, simpler ways (such as
      using XLink in the first place)

I think that (a) is getting less and less true, that (b) wouldn't be a
bad idea in any case, and I've yet to see a suggestion for (c) that
actually works...

Cheers,

Jeni

[1] http://lists.xml.org/archives/xml-dev/200209/msg00428.html

---
Jeni Tennison
http://www.jenitennison.com/

Received on Saturday, 28 September 2002 11:36:30 UTC