xml-dev - Re: XLink: behavior must go!

[Paul Prescod <paul@prescod.net>]

Jonathan Borden wrote:
> 
>     Is there anything within XLink itself that cannot be replaced by XSLT
> now that doc() and docref() have been defined? Does XLink not become
> something akin to a standard set of XSLT templates used for handling URI
> traversal? doc() and docref(), as well as unification with XPointer turn
> XSLT into a generalized graph transformation language. Could the XLink spec
> itself become an XSLT include file?

Yes. I outlined the features that XSL would require in order to allow link
recognition in the first message. It must be possible to ask the XSL
processor whether an element is an anchor (not a link), what the other
anchors are and what the properties of the linking element are. In other
words the XSL processor must itself be able to recognize and traverse
links.

This really isn't a lot of work and I feel that it should go into XSLT
version 1 but I suspect that the behavior attributes confused everybody
(as they did me for a long time). Those attributes were well-intentioned
but after a lot of thought I've come to the conclusion that they were a
mistake. It took me more than a year to come to figure that out but I'm
pretty confident now.

-- 
 Paul Prescod  - ISOGEN Consulting Engineer speaking for only himself
 http://itrc.uwaterloo.ca/~papresco

Earth will soon support only survivor species -- dandelions, roaches, 
lizards, thistles, crows, rats. Not to mention 10 billion humans.
	- Planet of the Weeds, Harper's Magazine, October 1998



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