XLink conformance criteria question

First some background.  I'm involved in implementing a UA (web browser, to be 
exact) which has support several XML-based languages and has built-in XLink 
support.  We only support simple XLinks for the time being, so I will restrict 
the rest of this mail to those.  I will also restrict myself to consideration of 
XLink 1.1.

Based on the discussion at 
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-svg/2006Apr/0027.html I reread the XLink 
specification today, and now I'm wondering about the conformance of our XLink 
implementation and about what it takes to be a conformant XLink implementation 
in general.

Let us consider the following XML document:

<?xml version=1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<root xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink/"
       xlink:type="simple" xlink:show="replace"
       xlink:actuate="onRequest"
       xlink:href="http://www.example.com">
   Text
</root>

Looking at the XLink specification [1], the behavior of this markup (as far as 
user interaction goes) seems to be essentially undefined.  In particular:

1)  It's not clear when (if ever) the link should be actuated.
2)  The definition of the "onRequest" value of xlink:actuate is a "should"
3)  The behavior of the "replace" value for xlink:show is a "should".

In other words, as far as I can tell an application that does absolutely nothing 
special here (eg just shows the text "Text") is a conforming XLink application. 
  And so is an XLink application that traverses the link as soon as the 
"</root>" end tag is parsed and shows http://www.example.com in a new window.

Is that correct?

-Boris

Received on Tuesday, 4 April 2006 23:50:01 UTC