comments on 21-February-2000 XLink WD

It looks great. I saw a few terminology points that should be clarified
before the spec is frozen:

1. From section 1. Introduction "Other kinds of links may exist and even be
encoded in XML, but the term as used here refers only to an XLink link."
From 1.1: "...automated translation of HTML links to XML links must be
possible." Because the first passage allows for the possibility of non-XLink
XML links, the second should read "automated translation of HTML links to
XLink links." (Or it should read "to XLinks"--the first paragraph of 3.1 is
the only place I saw where the noun "XLink" is used to refer to an
XLink-compliant link; if it is a proper term to use, it should have its own
entry in section 1.3. The definition may seem obvious, but the XLink spec
should clearly define the possible usage of the term "XLink.")

2. section 2: "Document creators can use the XLink global attributes to make
the elements in their own namespace." What does this mean by "make"? Isn't
there a more appropriate verb to use here?

3: 3.1 Most of the spec refers to simple links as being different from
extended links, but given the way extended links are defined, simple links
seem to qualify as extended links. ("arbitrary number of resources"--like 2?
"may be any combination of remote and local") 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. The definition
of extended links should explicitly say either that all links are extended
and that simple links are a subset of this group or else identify why they
are separate. The XML spec explicitly says that valid documents must be
well-formed, and look how many people have gone around saying that documents
were valid *or* well-formed. I see a chance to head off some greater
confusion here.

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 Friday, 25 February 2000 12:44:54 UTC