Re: [xml-dev] Xlink Isn't Dead

["Bob DuCharme" <bob@snee.com>]

On Fri, September 22, 2006 7:37 am, Ben Trafford wrote:

>  A lot of the mindset was influenced by the SGML world, and a
> lot of the work was influenced by the priorities at the W3C, which
> were to get things out as quickly as possible, to cement XML's legitimacy.

I think that this was part of XLink's problem: the SGML influence was on
how to model links so that they could be converted to links in multiple
media, and the W3C (HTML) influence was on how to specify link behavior in
browsers  (with lots of accessibility caveats thrown in to make it clear
that the spec was talking about ideal browsers of the future), and
specification for modeling links with specification for implementing them,
however generalized, made it a messy spec.

What Michael said earlier in this thread bears repeating:

  ...the big mistake in XLink is a failure to recognize that there are
  two separate things: a relationship between pieces of information, and
  a navigable hyperlink. We've achieved the separation of content from
  presentation in other areas, we just haven't achieved it for
  relationships.  The presentation forms do need better navigation
  facilities, and core XML also needs (much) better facilities for
  modeling relationships.

Which is why I disagree with this:

> In an ideal world, a lot of XLink would've gone into the
> styling languages.

XLink doesn't belong in a styling language like XSL-FO any more than
chapter and title elements do. Just as we use XSLT to convert from DocBook
semantic markup indicating chapters and titles to both HTML and XSL-FO
equivalents, as appropriate, I'd rather see XLink add to the richness of
the semantic relationships expressed within DocBook and other semantic
markup schemas so that XSLT can convert that markup to hypertext links, or
TOCs, or endnotes, or popups, or whatever is appropriate for the output
medium in question.

I wrote a lot more about this in my old O'Reilly blog, which focused on
linking (http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/au/1191, click on "BLOG"). Elliot
Kimber has also been writing some interesting stuff on linking in his
weblog recently (http://drmacros-xml-rants.blogspot.com/).

Bob
http://www.snee.com/bobdc.blog