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

["Peter Hunsberger" <peter.hunsberger@gmail.com>]

On 9/28/06, Jirka Kosek <jirka@kosek.cz> wrote:
> 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. By
> > "stylesheet languages," I am specifically referring to XSL-FO and CSS.
> >
> >     2) Links need to be declared in generic XML,
>
> 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 mean if you
> have some generic XML, e.g.:
>
> <hotel moreinfo="http://example.org/dream-hotel";>
>    ...
>
> and you are able to say that this element should work as link on a
> stylesheet level, e.g.:
>
> hotel { link-type: simple;
>          link-target: attr(moreinfo);
>        }
>
> what is then point of point 2?

That question can be rephrased as: do you want to describe the
relationships in the CSS or do you want to separate the relationship
discovery from the presentation?

In your example, the relationship is hard coded in the CSS as

    link-target: attr(moreinfo);

that's a pretty limited capability and doesn't easily allow for two
way linking, dynamic linking or many other things that people want to
do.   Instead someone may want something more like:

   <hotel name="Dream"/>

and in a separate document

   <link select="/hotel[@name = 'Dream']"
href="http://example.org/dream-hotel"/>

and in the CSS:

    link { link-type: simple  }

Don't get hung up on my syntax here.  The point is, the concepts of
presentation and relationship building need to be separated.

-- 
Peter Hunsberger