Re: A modest hyperlinking proposal

Hi Micah,

>>I take it, then, that the difference that you were referring to
>>between <a> (xml:href) and <img> (xml:src) was one of actuation
>
> I think of it like CSS. HTML has a "default stylesheet", which
> provides guidance on how different elements should be styled.
> Implementations are free to follow or diverge from the default
> stylesheet in whatever way makes sense.
>
> Similarly, one common interpretation would be:
>
> xml:href => xlink:actuate="onLoad" xlink:show="replace"
> xml:src  => xlink:actuate="onRequest" xlink:show="embed"
>
> but a major point is not to hard code it.

Oh. So in other words, the two attributes give you two possible
actuate/show combinations to play with, out of the possible 6 (or 8 if
you include actuate="onRequestSecondary"; I'm not counting 'other' or
'none'). Which combination you associate with a particular attribute
on a particular element is up to you. So for example, I could just as
easily do:

xml:src  => xlink:actuate="onLoad" xlink:show="replace"
xml:href => xlink:actuate="onRequest" xlink:show="embed"

Have I interpreted you correctly?

I thought you were going for something deeper than providing two
possible attributes rather than one -- that there was something that
actually distinguished them in terms of when each should be used. If
not, then I think that the suggestion (was it Eric's?) of turning
*any* attribute into a link by putting it in an XLink (or something)
namespace would be better. That way you could do:

  <img xlink:src="..." xlink:longdesc="..." />

and, indeed, have as many attributes as you wanted, with whatever
(local) names you wanted, specifying behaviour and semantics based on
the local name somewhere else.
  
Cheers,

Jeni

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

Received on Monday, 30 September 2002 17:43:30 UTC