Re: FW: A modest hyperlinking proposal

Hi Micah,

> 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

Sweet :)

> 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.

I take it, then, that the difference that you were referring to
between <a> (xml:href) and <img> (xml:src) was one of actuation --
when the link is traversed -- rather than what you do with whatever
you find at the other end? (Whether you replace or embed is the other
obvious difference between the two...)

> 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.

So in XLink terms, these would cover actuate="onRequest" and
actuate="onLoad" but not actuate="none" or actuate="other", which I
think is reasonable. HLink introduced actuate="onRequestSecondary",
but I guess that's beyond the 80% point?

Cheers,

Jeni

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

Received on Monday, 30 September 2002 16:40:55 UTC