Proposal: Multiple roles in XLink.

The current recommended, 27 June 2001, XLink specification states in section
5.5 that the value of the role or arcrole attribute must be a URI reference.
There are times when encoding roles or arcroles that you would like to
specify that a locator, resource or arc can take on multiple roles.  Under
the existing standard you just cannot convey this information in a concise
manner.  It seems to me that the current recommendation could be amended
with a very minor change to section 5.5.

My proposal is to amend section 5.5 to say that the value of the role or
arcrole attributes must be one or more URI references separated by spaces.
Since spaces in URI references should have been properly encoded there would
be no conflict with allowing multiple URI's separated by spaces in the role
or arcrole attributes.

I'm curious as to what the authors of the XLink specification and other
think about this proposal.

Thanks, Andy.

Received on Thursday, 7 March 2002 12:22:11 UTC