- From: Roy T. Fielding <fielding@apache.org>
- Date: Tue, 23 Sep 2003 16:52:36 -0700
- To: "David Orchard" <dorchard@bea.com>
- Cc: <noah_mendelsohn@us.ibm.com>, "'Ian B. Jacobs'" <ij@w3.org>, <www-tag@w3.org>
> What do you mean by "active" versus "descriptive" links? Active links are actuated by processes that traverse the information with a hypertext engine. Anchor href, img src, and stylesheets fall into this category. Descriptive links are supplementary information, such as xmlns or <link>, that establish a relationship between resources without an expectation that it will be actuated during normal processing. Those links might be the focus of other actions, such as SemWeb stuff, but not hypertext. > I have kind of thought that "hyper" is associated with generally human > targetted. XLink, intended for hyperlinking, has "show" and "actuate" > axis > because of the "hyper" part. Er, I don't know about that (MOMspider is not human, so I think that distinction has never held true). "hyper" is a synonym for "extremely active", and the reason the UI style was named "hypertext" is because the rendered text (whether it be bytes, image, or stream) is active in the sense of being the control-point for actions. Thus, hypertext is equivalent to "activetext", where "text" refers to a rendered set of information. The word "hyperlink" is just a conjunction of hypertext link, or active link from a UI POV. ....Roy
Received on Tuesday, 23 September 2003 19:54:42 UTC