- From: DuCharme, Robert <DuCharmR@moodys.com>
- Date: Wed, 22 Dec 1999 15:26:18 -0500
- To: "'www-xml-linking-comments@w3.org'" <www-xml-linking-comments@w3.org>
There's some great progress, but various points seem more confusing now than they did in the last draft. 1: From "Introduction": "higher-level applications layered on XLink are expected to specify their required rendering and processing treatments separately." This is a great way to help focus XLink's role, and is a sentence people should be coming back to repeatedly. 2: 1.3 The definitions of "link" and "resource" are pretty circular. (See "circular definition" and "definition, circular" in the index of Knuth volume 1--in early editions, they just pointed at each other.) It's not a tight little loop, but the definitions for those, "linking element," and "resource," and "locator" would be more helpful if they weren't so interdependent. 3: 1.3 "local resource" The whole second sentence is confusing. Does "regular" have a technical meaning here (cf. "regular expression")? 4: 3.1 Most of the spec refers to simple links as being different from extended links, but the way extended links are defined simple links seem to be a subset of extended links. ("arbitrary number of resources"--like 2? "may be remote"--may be, but doesn't have to be; "some of the link's own content can serve optionally as local resources, in which case the link is inline.") I may be missing something, but if not, the relationship of simple and extended links elsewhere in the spec (like 3.2 "The purpose of a simple link is to be a convenient shorthand for the equivalent extended link...a simple link could be represented by an extended link...") should be more carefully worded to show that simple links are not different from extended links but a subset of them. 5: 3.1 "The only kind of XLink that can be..." This is the only place that I saw "XLink" used as a noun to refer to an XLink-conformant XML link. Otherwise, as a noun, it refers to the XML Linking Language. I don't see anything wrong with this, but I think the term deserves an entry in 1.3, "Terminology" to clarify the potential meanings. 6: 3.1.1 Demonstrating the use of a foo element with "<foo>...</foo>" doesn't tell us much about the use of a foo element. The examples for xlink:resource and gpa don't add anything to the spec. They should be fleshed out or deleted. 7: Issue (arc-semantics) "There's no sensible place to display the title text..." Does it have to be about display? "Should we allow arc elements to have roles and titles?" Yes. It fits in with the XLink philosophy of enabling the description of resource relationships to be taken advantage of by applications however they can or wish to. 8: Issue (Display-centric) "Can we motivate [the behavior attributes] in a less display-centric way?" Just changing the word "show" to something else would be a big step. "Action" perhaps? And change "actuate" to "cue" to avoid action/actuate confusion? Bob DuCharme www.snee.com/bob <bob@ snee.com> "The elements be kind to thee, and make thy spirits all of comfort!" Anthony and Cleopatra, III ii
Received on Wednesday, 22 December 1999 15:25:53 UTC