xml-dev - RE: XLink WD's Change Decision

["Joel A. Nava" <jnava@vertical.net>]

David,

Even if the 19980303 draft does not mention it, that section of
the draft was viewed as being outside the scope of what was to
be accomplished with XLink. Show and actuate were seen as necessary
for the Spec. But the editors of the draft felt uncomfortable about
the other "behaviors." They were never going to define any of those
behaviors, but just allow an extension mechanism for others to
define and use. Sometime after this, the XML Linking WG was formed,
and a lot of new people were added to the group.

My guess is that the XML Linking WG was either convinced that they
should not provide such a mechanism, or because of the changing
requirements, and additional work added to the group (splitting
into XPointer and XLink, doing XPath with the XSL WG, the work that
went into trying to coordinate with the initial efforts to form
a XML Query Language WG, and others), decided to drop it for now.

Unless XML Linking is going to cover this area of work,
somebody should probably make a stab at the spec, and then
try to get some support from others, for instance xml-dev,
and then bring it to a standards body for further work.

Joel Nava


From: David Wang
 
> I have a question concerning the XLink working draft.  Namely, I 
> was curious
> about the evolution of the XLink concept, so I read some of the 
> past working
> drafts from 1998 and 1999.  One thing that caught my attention 
> was the fact
> that the 19980303 draft had a very open and grand notion of "Link 
> Behavior". 
> It allowed the author to give hints to the timing of certain 
> actions like show
> and actuate and then define some arbitrary behavior to occur when 
> the link is
> traversed, including: "opening, closing, or scrolling windows or panes...
> testing, authenticating, or logging user and context information; 
> or executing
> various programs".


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