Re: [xml-dev] "Introducing MicroXML, Part 1: Explore the basic principle

[David Carlisle <davidc@nag.co.uk>]

On 25/06/2012 16:39, Rushforth, Peter wrote:
> So code-on-demand would work not only for HTML, but also more
> powerfully, for anything XML.

It would be a really retrograde step to force certain named
attribute/elements to have _fixed_ semantics. That is by design one of
the main differences between using a language-specific markup such as
html and a generic markup such as xml. It is (more or less) OK to do 
this for things in the xml namepsace, but certainly not for all href
attributes for example). Even something like xml:id is sort of OK but
its benefits are rather limited as usually you don't want to use a fixed
name, you want to use a name that fits with the application design. (id
for example). This has always been a fatal flaw in xlink (and explicitly
why it was never adopted in xhtml2 drafts as using html-specific
attribute such as href and src were always going to be more popular _in
html_ than xlink variants of the same).

If you want the xml to be treated as html with <link elements
associating scripts and stylesheets etc, and href acting like 
xhtml:a/@href then supply an xslt stylesheet that expresses that behaviour.

Note even in (x)html href doesn't -always- denote a link (although that
was proposed for xhtml2) Html href only implies a link on
certain pre-specified elements. So the fact that href in unknown xml
does not imply any linking behaviour is entirely consistent.

If you modify your browsers default xslt (or if you serve the xml
already associated to a non-default xslt) then you can already do
everything that you ask. If you serve xml in an unknown vocabulary then
it is right that the browser does not interpret it at all and just shows
it verbatim (with optionally syntax highlighting applied) to do anything
different would be confusing, or dangerous or both.

But actually I'm confused. This thread is about microxml so given that
browsers already do full xml so are presumably highly unlikely to do
microxml as well, how would adding pre-defined semantics to xml:link in
microxml help or hinder the use of xml on the web?

David


David

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