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While reading Micah's SkunkLink proposal, I was struck by the simplicity of
using an 'a' element to represent one-to-many links in HTML. I remember
seeing an argument against this somewhere, but don't remember it, so I went
ahead and prototyped an implementation. If you go to
http://www.snee.com/xml/linking/1toMdemo.xml you should see a page where
the green links are 1-to-many links. A View Source will show that the file
is basic XHMTL, except that the green links are marked up as nested 'a'
links. View Source will also show that an XSLT stylesheet is used,
http://www.snee.com/xml/linking/1toM.xml (1toMdemo.xml explains why the
stylesheet has an "xml" extension) that just copies all elements through
but converts 'a' elements with 'a' children to menus implemented with some
JavaScript code that I learned about from a Netscape DevEdge article at
http://developer.netscape.com/viewsource/smith_menu/smith_menu.html.
Changing the XHTML content model for the 'a' element to allow nesting of
them is an awfully small change to make to its DTD. (What would you with
with deeper nesting levels? Turn them into submenus.)
For 1-to-many linking in more generalized linking constructs outside of
XHTML (e.g. XLink and any of the successors cropping up), this combination
of XSLT plus the DevEdge menuing code makes prototyping of the linking
surprisingly easy.
Bob DuCharme www.snee.com/bob <bob@
snee.com> "The elements be kind to thee, and make thy
spirits all of comfort!" Anthony and Cleopatra, III ii
(NOTE: bobdc e-mail address used only for mailing lists;
please send private e-mail to bob@)
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