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

[Ben Trafford <ben@prodigal.ca>]

	(In which I display that I'm a philistine.)

	I keep reading people talking about things like "ontologies" and 
"graph structures" and "relationship semantics" and I have to confess 
that it all starts to meld into "bleah bleah bleah."

	I'm sure these are important issues. But at the end of the day, I 
want to know why I can't take this:

<link location="http://www.prodigal.ca";>This is a link</link>

	and style it as a link in a web browser. I want to know why I can't 
model behavior and display like <img> and <a> and <object> in plain 
XML without resorting to XHTML tags. I want to know why I can't 
repurpose a link's behavior for different display situations.

	I want to know why I can't leverage the power evident in XLink's 
concepts via CSS and XSL-FO!

	Some people have said that link behavior doesn't belong in 
stylesheets and that I'm missing the point. They point to the 
semantics of modelling relationships, and claim that simple document 
transformation will give me what I want.

	Except that XSL-FO doesn't support anything beyond unidirectional, 
simple links. CSS won't allow me to render any tag I want as a link, 
and the link styling is does do is also unidirectional and simple.

	I'm betraying my Web focus, certainly, but I really, really want to 
see powerful links in browsers. I really don't want to have to code a 
few dozen lines of Javascript everytime I want to display something 
beyond a single-ended, one-way link. I don't want to have to code 
dropdown menus in some scripting language. I want to be able to click 
on a link in a webpage and see multiple link ends, to and from the 
content. I want to be able to build one document from various 
fragments, automatically, without having to use the include features 
of some scripting language, or some on-the-fly XSLT transformation.

	You can talk about semantics and ontologies and all the stuff that 
has been spinning the wheels of the *ML communities for the last 
twenty years, but until I can render any generic XML with the power 
of an XLink, then I'm not interested.

	So far, I haven't heard any cogent arguments for why the CSS and 
XSL-FO people shouldn't be do a lot more with link rendering than they have.

--->Ben