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At 02:43 PM 8/17/2002 -0400, Simon St.Laurent wrote:
>Ben Trafford writes:
> > Who cares? Give me a linking spec, and then use it, people!
>
>A closing like this makes me really wonder... hypertext is complex
>enough stuff that I think some serious attention to the fit between
>specs and application is critically important.
After an exchange on the side, where Simon was kind enough to
point out that what I wrote didn't reflect my intention, let me rephrase in
the hopes of attaining clarity:
What I meant to say was simple in concept, and quite complex in
application.
I believe that we need a hyperlinking language that most people
like. I don't think that any of the solutions on the table are it. I don't
think that a lot of the discussion going on is terrifically productive.
I'm a stalwart of this school of thought: "Keep it simple. Solve
as many problems as you can. Expect that some audience, somewhere, is going
to be terribly unhappy with your results. Iterate as needed."
A lot of what I've seen proposed by the XHTML people is well and
fine. A lot of what I see in XLink is well and fine. A lot of what I see in
HyTime and other hypertext standards is also well and fine.
What I'd like to see the list discuss are the substantive problems
raised by all of these groups, and then tear them apart, one by one....just
like in the good ol' days of XML, when the XML WG would drop stuff on
XML-dev, see it hashed out, and then make a decision. That was a good
process. It worked.
The XHTML folks' list of complaints with XLink would be a
wonderful place to start tearing things apart and examining them. And since
I've spent most of this message attempting to clarify a previous point and
doing some philosophizing myself, I'll propose a concrete question for
y'all to tear apart:
"What do we lose with XHTML dropping 'href' in favour of a
namespace-specific attribute, be it XLink or otherwise, in consideration of
the fact that they've already changed huge chunks of a familiar markup
language?"
Here's another:
"Should any generic hyperlinking specification either provide
behaviour instructions or provide some mechanism to refer to behaviour
instructions?" (e.g. XLink points to the XHTML spec for the behaviour of a
simple link in an XHTML application, and XLink points to XSLFOs for the
processing of the same simple link in an XSLFO-aware browser, etc.)
--->Ben
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