XLINK instead of AJAX?

[walter kriha <walter@kriha.de>]

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Dear list members,

I have not been following the list or XML development in general for a
long time so please forgive me if I am beating a dead horse here...

Working on software security issues I took a look at some Ajax
technologies and their security implications. There are many different
ways to contact servers and embed content into pages (XMLHttpRequest,
dynamically added script tags etc.). And I was wondering: lots of code -
and no tags?

That reminded me about Xlink - the one standard that surprised me
completely by taking a long time to get finished and then to disappear
(or did I miss something here?).

I was a big fan of HyTime and its powerful addressing and linking
expressions. Looks like we got the addressing part (Xpath) but where is
the linking? I guess the linking and embedding is now done with AJAX -
in other words with code instead of a descriptive way.

I am not saying that all things in Web 2.0 could be done descriptively.
But I am disappointed that it is not used at all (am I wrong here?)

Some ideas about the reasons: Did XLink in browsers raise too many
security issues? (Cross-domain, same origing etc) If so, I don't see
anything different if this is done in code instead of tags.

Tags would allow us to express the intentions more clearly and the
implementations in agents are probably more stable than individual
script code. (testability etc.). And there is the social side as well:
many who publish today on the web learned it from looking at HTML source
of other sites and copying the tags. But the skills to master large code
bases in Javascript are not available to everybody.

Don't get me wrong: I sure like what can be done in Web2.0 today. But I
am not so sure about the way it is done with code. To me it looks a bit
like we have given up on the idea of information aggregation through
tags. But if descriptive HyTime was too complex - doesn't the code have
the same complexity just hidden somewhere?

If somebody could point me to some discussions on this topic I'd really
appreciate it.

Cheers,

Walter Kriha
www.kriha.org
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