Re: Title elements

Hi again Elliotte-- We'll add this issue and discuss it.  One quick note, 
though: Did you see the other motivation for having title elements?  If you 
need internal markup, you can't use an attribute; you have to resort to an 
element.  So restricting the content to #PCDATA would defeat one of the 
purposes.  However, this doesn't change your main point...

         Eve

At 07:14 PM 7/10/00 -0700, Elliotte Rusty Harold wrote:
>The latest July 3 XLink candidate recommendation introduces title type
>elements as a supplement to xlink:title attributes. I'm really not sure
>they're necessary or useful in practice, and I'd like to propose
>simplifying XLink by deleting all reference to title type attributes.
>
>Here's my reasoning: Since semantics of child elements of XLink elements
>like arc and locator elements, including title type elements are
>application defined, why not just leave this up the application?
>Applications can decide what is and is not a title for an XLink element
>on an appication by application basis. Since the spec doesn't provide a
>syntax for title type elements, applications require application-level
>logic to figure out what to do with titles anyway.
>
>Furthermore, allowing title elements requires XLink processors to go one
>level further down the tree in an extended link. It seems cleaner to say
>that only immediate children of the extended link element can have any
>possible implications for the extended link, with no exceptions. As it
>is now title type elements may appear as grandchildren of the extended
>link element, the only such grandchildren elements.
>
>The one use case given in the CR is "One common motivation for using the
>title-type element is to account for internationalization and
>localization. For example, title markup might be necessary for
>bidirectional contexts or in East Asian languages, and multiple titles
>might be necessary for different natural-language versions of a title."
>I suspect this could be done with non-XLink defined markup anyway, but
>if XLink markup is really required then this should limit the content of
>a title element to #PCDATA, same as the single title attribute it's
>subbing for.
>
>But mostly, since there's no syntax defined for the title type elements,
>applications will need to define their own semantics anyway; and they
>could do this just as easily with elements that were not defined in the
>XLink specification. I just don't see what title type elements bring to
>the party.

--
Eve Maler                                    +1 781 442 3190
Sun Microsystems XML Technology Center    elm @ east.sun.com

Received on Tuesday, 11 July 2000 10:42:30 UTC