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Ok, so you are displaying it with a stylesheet
and what you want is for links to work:
o regardless of stylesheet
or
o by recognizing the form you have from the stylesheet.
and of course, you don't want a hyperlink to be anything
but a control for launching a display. It should never
be an abstraction of "relates to" or "is a".
Think of this exercise as if HTML had never existed and you
were being asked to develop a hypermedia system that
will run on any platform across a network. If you
had to engineer that from scratch, you might start
by trying to figure out what all of the possible
documents have in common, and after clearing away
all the red herrings (eg, structural items like
paragraphs and headers and tables), you would
come down to this one control called a hyperlink.
1. One side will start arguing that this is
just a presentation issue.
2. One side will argue that a link is a link is
a link and that all presentation semantics are
late bound so hyperlinks are really abstractions
or arc/node thingies.
Then you will start building up a framework of
objects that can recognize any link anywhere
by some magical induction process. When that
gets to cumbersome, you'll simplify it to have
a flag on it to tell you it is a hyperlink. Someone
will say that doesn't allow for both 1 and 2, so
you'll add some more discriminating flags for
roles, etc.
Eventually someone will get tired of all of this complex
stuff and say, "hey, let's just gencode it, name it
anchor, and declare by standard that any document anywhere
that works in our system shall use <anchor />. By the
way, our system shall be the only system available, and
that will be because it is the standard.
Y'all really are well on your way through ISO 10744
and out the back door to HTML. Time to make your
requirements more explicit than a use case.
len
-----Original Message-----
From: Micah Dubinko [mailto:MDubinko@cardiff.com]
Joe English:
>How is blind recognition of links any more useful than
>blind recognition of any other data type (which is to say,
>not very)?
How about a use case:
I want to put, say, DocBook on the web. I can do this today and use a
stylesheet to make it display reasonably, even though none of my browsers
have any built in knowledge of DocBook.
I also would like the links to work.
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