"show" attribute and fragments

Section 5.6.1 of the XLink CR contains the following:

"If the starting resource is a fragment whose location set contains
multiple nodes, then an application should treat each node of the
starting resource as an individual starting resource and traverse to the
ending resource as a succession of single traversals in the style of a
programming "foreach" construct."

I can't understand what this means.  Is it saying that an arc from a
starting-resource that contains multiple nodes is equivalent to a set of
arcs one for each node?  That seems a totally bizarre interpretation.

Why are multiple nodes in a starting resource handled in a completely
non-orthogonal way from multiple nodes in an ending resource?

What happens when the starting resource includes ranges or points?

In general, I was unable to understand from the description of the show
attribute what the intended behaviour was when the ending resource was a
fragment of a complete document.  Should it extract the fragment and
display just that or should it display a window on the complete document
with the document scrolled so that the start of the fragment is in the
window?

James

Received on Monday, 25 September 2000 04:02:06 UTC