FW: A modest hyperlinking proposal

Originally appeared on xml-dev. Forwarding to www-tag upon request. -m

-----Original Message-----
From: Micah Dubinko 
Sent: Monday, September 30, 2002 11:04 AM
To: 'Tim Bray'; Eric van der Vlist
Cc: xml-dev@lists.xml.org
Subject: A modest hyperlinking proposal


Tim Bray:

>I want the markup to explicit and self-documenting

I will agree with this, although it does raise some interesting issues
(like, are DTD defaulted attributes still "explicit" and
"self-documenting"??)

Anyway.. 

There's really two major kinds of hypertext linking: the equivalent of html
<a>, and the equivalent of html <img> (or <object>). Could this be the 80/20
point?

What if there were two new kinds of simple links, both identified by a
single attribute:

xml:href for <a>-style links
xml:src for <img>-style links

The xml prefix is chosen because
>I think links have special importance to the Web

The presence of either of these single attributes indicates a link between
the local element and the remote resource indicated. It does _not_ provide
any hard guidance on what to do with the link (thus no 'show' & 'embed'
attributes). User agents are free to (as they do now) interpret and process
the link in whatever way makes sense.

This also, I believe, addresses the HTML Working Group's objection to having
the limit of a single attribute per type. While it's true that there can
still be at most a single xml:href attribute, there is also only a single
way to do the default activation of a link. Similarly for xml:src, there is
only a single source of content for the link.

Many other kinds of links, like to security descriptors, etc. would be
considered outside the scope of XLink and thus could use attributes named
anything at all, avoiding conflicts.

Combined with something like local-extended [1], I could see a solution
along these lines meeting the needs of the HTML guys, and everybody else.

For linkbases and more complicated extended links, XLink 1.0 of course
continues to be the best way to go.

Thanks,

.micah

[1] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-tag/2002Sep/0291.html

-----Original Message-----
From: Tim Bray [mailto:tbray@textuality.com]
Sent: Monday, September 30, 2002 10:22 AM
To: Eric van der Vlist
Cc: xml-dev@lists.xml.org
Subject: Re: [xml-dev] limits of the generic


On Monday, September 30, 2002, at 10:13 AM, Eric van der Vlist wrote:

>> Personally, it's not an interesting solution to me because I want
>> links to be manifest even in well-formed documents that don't have a
>> W3C XML Schema, let alone documents that use other schema 
>> technologies.
>
> I don't want to be nasty, but can't this be interpreted as defining
> limits to what the PSVI can be used for and denying its implicit claim
> to be generic which was (as far as I can remember since this thread is
> becoming difficult to follow) Simon's initial point?

I'm 100% with Norm.  I want the markup to explicit and 
self-documenting, as opposed to off in the PSVI which you only compute 
by fetching another (potentially large & complex) resource and 
processing it.  I have grave concerns about the PSVI in general and its 
"implicit claims to be generic" in particular.

> You want links to be manifest in well formed documents because links 
> are
> obviously important to you but couldn't I want the same for any other
> type which is important to me?

Yep, but I think links have special importance to the Web and should be 
manifest in documents used on the Web. -Tim


-----------------------------------------------------------------
The xml-dev list is sponsored by XML.org <http://www.xml.org>, an
initiative of OASIS <http://www.oasis-open.org>

The list archives are at http://lists.xml.org/archives/xml-dev/

To subscribe or unsubscribe from this list use the subscription
manager: <http://lists.xml.org/ob/adm.pl>

Received on Monday, 30 September 2002 15:27:34 UTC