xml-dev - Re: Didier's lab report

["Simon St.Laurent" <simonstl@simonstl.com>]

At 05:36 PM 12/13/00 +0100, Simon North wrote:
>Simon St.Laurent said:
>
>> I wonder if maybe there'd be a way to establish this a little more
>> solidly as a means of providing metadata about links and inclusions. 
>> XLink already provides some metadata, but I suspect we're going to
>> find more places where extra information about a link might be useful,
>> and where they might be useful across multiple applications.  
>
>Isn't this precisely where topic maps come in?

In some ways, yes, very much so!  I like to think of topic maps as
meta-hypertext, providing a clear and more navigable view of the links
without letting the content get in the way.  There's plenty of interesting
work to be done in XLink/Topic Map relations.

In another way, however, I don't think they'd be appropriate to the digital
signature and stylesheet use cases explored in the last few days.  It
doesn't seem like the kinds of metadata needed for those require the
capabilities of topic maps, nor would the applications processing that
metadata necessarily understand topic maps.

Simon St.Laurent
XML Elements of Style / XML: A Primer, 2nd Ed.
XHTML: Migrating Toward XML
http://www.simonstl.com - XML essays and books