Re: [xml-dev] Are hyperlinks presentation or content?

[Elliotte Rusty Harold <elharo@metalab.unc.edu>]

All this CSS vs. linking debate about whether links are presentation 
or content reminds me of something I wrote several years ago in the 
XML Bible. Maybe they're neither, or, less proscriptively, maybe they 
don't have to be either. Quoting myself:

This expands the abstraction of style sheets into the linking domain. 
A style sheet is completely separate from the document it describes 
and yet provides rules that modify how the document is presented to 
the reader. A linkbase containing out-of-line links is separated from 
the documents it connects, yet it provides the necessary links to the 
reader. This has several advantages, including keeping more 
presentation-oriented markup separate from the document and allowing 
the linking of read-only documents.

XLink specifically enables the possibility of "link sheets", and 
allows the application of different links sheets to one document. Of 
course, this would be out-of-line markup that required a separate 
processing step, but if this is an interesting use-case, then that is 
what you need.

-- 

+-----------------------+------------------------+-------------------+
| Elliotte Rusty Harold | elharo@metalab.unc.edu | Writer/Programmer |
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|          XML in a  Nutshell, 2nd Edition (O'Reilly, 2002)          |
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|  http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN%3D0596002920/cafeaulaitA/  |
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