Andrew Watt
wrote: The sad reality is that (hyper)linking at the W3C is a
horrible mess. The mess was, at least in part, caused by naive assumptions at
W3C circa 1998 about how XML would be used on the Web. Remember XML as "SGML for
the Web"? Over the next couple of years as the use of XML evolved the approach
in XLink seemed to play a perpetual game of catch up. The end result was that
the XLink specification ended up a little like a camel at a sophisticated dinner
party - useful for specific tasks but misshapen, with nobody wanting to go too
close because of its bad breath and many trying to pretend it simply wasn't
there.
In my view the mess is because
XLink simply doesn't fit into the layering of the XML architecture. The whole
point of XML is that you can choose any names you like for your objects and
attributes, and give them any semantics that you like (typically captured
in schemas and stylesheets). So why should relationships be different from
objects and attributes, and require fixed names and fixed
semantics?
Hyperlinking is something that
belongs in the user interface layer, not in the
stored information. The stored information needs to hold relationship
information in a much more abstract form. The hyperlinks, like all other user
interface objects, should be generated by the stylesheet. It's because the
hyperlinking community failed to recognize this that the idea failed to catch
on. The other consequence of this is that there is a gaping hole in the XML
story as to how abstract relationships should be
modelled.
Michael Kay
