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At 3:09 PM +0100 9/17/02, Jeni Tennison wrote:
>I guess that my argument would be that if you are happy for this
>restricted kind of transformation to be specified within a schema,
>then why not allow for the specification of more flexible
>transformations as well, including those that can deal with the facts
>that (a) people, it seems, want to use domain-specific terminology
>when naming attributes that hold URIs (which could be handled by an
>AF) and (b) people want to be able to specify multiple links from the
>same target without using separate elements for each of them (which
>needs something more sophisticated).
Umm, because I don't want to bother inventing yet another schema
language? My hope is that we can make the minimal change necessary.
Reinventing schemas to support linking is sort of like swallowing the
spider to catch the fly, and we all know where that leads. :-)
>I'm not sure that I would really choose to specify the linking
>semantics of an element in terms of a transformation to XLink (I think
>I'd probably prefer the second of the suggestions that I made -- a way
>of annotating attributes or elements to indicate that they are links)
>but it's preferable, to me, compared to forcing users to link to or
>specify explicitly the same HLink spec from each of their HTML
>documents.
My point is that in XHTML the element name alone (possibly in
conjunction with an xlink:href attribute) should be sufficient to
identify an element as a link and specify the type of link. We do not
need the ability to make any arbitrary element a link of arbitrary
type.
XHTML 2.0 does, I think I recall, want to allow an arbitrary element
to be a classic blue underlined link; and this can be done with the
xlink:type attribute on an element by element basis. HLink seems to
be identifying all elements of a certain type as links, which isn't
really the use case. But I do need to reread the spec a few more
times to make sure I understand it.
>Although I'd argue that it doesn't correctly reflect the semantics of
>the elements. As simple links, the source, longdesc and map elements
>are the resources which are linking to the URLs specified in their
>xlink:href attributes. I would have thought that the extended link
>semantic, which makes the alt text the local resource, is more
>accurate (though it still doesn't feel quite right, but I don't know
>how to make the object the local resource using XLink?).
Ummm, why do you say that? I think it perfectly reflects the
semantics of the elements, at least as much as anything in XML does
have semantics. I don't really give a hoot about local and extended
resources and all that other extended link fru-fru. I just want to
say here's an image, here's the description, here's the map file,
etc. What I've realized in the last 24 hours is that we don't need
extended XLInks, at least for XHTML. Simple links in child elements
with well-known names work just fine, and they're much easier to
explain to designers than either HLink or extended XLink.
To some extent this is tying back to the perennial attributes vs.
child elements thread. Here I'm beginning to notice that maybe
attributes never were right for a lot of the things they were used
for in HTML. (Another example: why is ALT an attribute instead of a
child? Linking aside, an ALT child would be very useful.)
--
+-----------------------+------------------------+-------------------+
| Elliotte Rusty Harold | elharo@metalab.unc.edu | Writer/Programmer |
+-----------------------+------------------------+-------------------+
| XML in a Nutshell, 2nd Edition (O'Reilly, 2002) |
| http://www.cafeconleche.org/books/xian2/ |
| http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN%3D0596002920/cafeaulaitA/ |
+----------------------------------+---------------------------------+
| Read Cafe au Lait for Java News: http://www.cafeaulait.org/ |
| Read Cafe con Leche for XML News: http://www.cafeconleche.org/ |
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