RE: [xml-dev] (In)Validate My Assumptions on Linking.

["Harbarth, Juliane" <Juliane.Harbarth@softwareag.com>]

>>Ben Trafford wrote:
>>     After much thinking, reading, and reviewing, I've come to these 
>> three ideas:
>>     1) Stylesheet languages need some sort of way to display links 
>> from generic XML. This is so we can interact with them in user
agents. 
>> 2) Links need to be declared in generic XML,
>> ...

> Jirka Kosek replied
> Given the point 1 which allows you to turn anything into link, 
> why you then need to declare it as link on XML level (point 2)
> ...

I strongly agree with this. Given an XML document and thinking how to
best render it,
I'd feel free to render some things as links and others not. That is,
some bits of information
might be best represented as something that leeds to some other resource
when treated
accordingly. When rendering, for example, an XML document as an HTML
page, some
text bits are suitably rendered as 'a' elements. The only bit of
meta-information interesting
herein is whether a bit of information is suitable to serve as an 'a'
element's href content,
i.e. whether it is a URI. But a schema mechanism provides me with this
information.

There are cases where the link-or-no question is totally proprietary. If
I publish
HTML pages on a server that also offers a dictionary, I'd surely like to
turn those terms
that in my XML document are marked as dictionary-term into links.
Publishing such a page in
any other environment better renders these as text only.

So should an XML document rather avoid to specify whether something is a
link or no ?
I am not sure I'd go that far.

Regards,
Juliane.