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

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

On Fri, September 22, 2006 2:09 pm, Nathan Young -X \(natyoung - Artizen
at Cisco\) wrote:

> As far as I understand it, topic maps match what you describe below in
> significant ways.

All right, you asked for it: if a link is a specific relationship between
two identifiable resources--a relationship that can be implemented with a
hypertext link or with whatever rendering a given medium is capable
of--and we want to express that link in such a way that the link itself
can have its own metadata, then RDF can do this quite well. It's
particularly good at out-of-line links (and RDF/XML is particularly bad at
inline links).

I'm only half serious, but I do think that RDF and Topic Maps played a
serious role in XLink's failure, which was mostly due to the lack of a
community that was excited about XLink enough to implement and promote it.
(We all know that a spec doesn't have to be good to have such a community
built around it.) People interested in building applications on top of
device-independent methods for expressing information relationships hopped
on the RDF and Topic Map trains, and the XLink train sat in the station
waiting for more passengers than the XBRL folk.

I wrote an article summarizing XLink's lack of success in XML.com over
four years ago (http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2002/03/13/xlink.html). While I
was embarrassed when Tony Coates pointed out that I had failed to mention
XBRL, a very successful project that uses a lot of XLink, that was about
it. I don't see how things have changed since then, outside of XBRL's own
growth.

Bob