Re: XLink: behavior must go!

At 06:23 AM 5/12/99 -0500, Paul Prescod wrote:
>
>I believe that the XLink behavioral attributes should be removed.
>Theoretically they mix presentation and structure.

I agree that they mix presentation and structure, but I also
feel that it is worthwhile to capture some common situations.
That is, allow people to define link "roles", but start out
with a few standard roles. This is analogous to including
xml:lang in the XML spec.

I'm concerned about XML being less useful than HTML because of
a lack of common elements (conventions). For example, an XML
author has no way to reliably give a web spider a title, description,
or robot hints (follow/nofollow, index/noindex). Also, link roles 
could be meaningful to an indexing program -- transcluded text 
should be indexed with the source doc, <a>-linked text shouldn't.

I'm hunting down a copy of the PCTE rationale, since it has a
nice description of the link roles in PCTE, and how they got
to that design.

Meanwhile, maybe I should write a NOTE proposing a PI analogous
to the robots meta tag (<?robots index="yes" follow="no"?>).

wunder

--
Walter R. Underwood
wunder@infoseek.com
wunder@best.com (home)
http://software.infoseek.com/cce/ (my product)
http://www.best.com/~wunder/
1-408-543-6946

Received on Thursday, 13 May 1999 11:47:43 UTC