Re: ***SPAM*** [xml-dev] Resource relationships

["Liam R. E. Quin" <liam@fromoldbooks.org>]

On Sat, 2020-06-13 at 05:33 +0000, Hans-Juergen Rennau wrote:
> 
> QUESTION 1. Why is XLink little adopted

It solved the wrong problem. That is, the primary use case it addressed
was, markup to include in one's doucment that could be identified by
soeone outside one's own organization or domain as a link. But that is
solving someone else's problem.

What was needed was something like HyTime Architectural Forms, to say,
in this DTD, in this document, such-and-such an attribute, or element,
or combination, represents a link, and _this_is how you construct the
URL from it.

But the working group became mired in arguments and politics.

It should be noted that some of the features XLink provides still have
no standard counterpart in HTML. Practical use cases and examples may
have made a difference, but HTML already had a/@href and img/@src, and
these canbe used in XML DTDs as easily as XLink.

A regret that i have is that an architectural forms route might have
let us say, "in this vocabulary, the following elements are paragraph-
like and these other ones are phrase-like", enabling search engines to
present useful snippets.

>  - can you identify important mistakes or omissions?QUESTION 2.
> Imagining for a moment, XLink were widely adopted, would a "link::"
> axis in XPath make sense, enabling expressions like:   /
> ancestor::airports / child::airport / link::airportDetails / @name

Or a follow() function maybe. Note that XLink permits multiple links on
an element, so one would need a way to say which links were of
interest.

Liam

-- 
Liam Quin, https://www.delightfulcomputing.com/
Available for XML/Document/Information Architecture/XSLT/
XSL/XQuery/Web/Text Processing/A11Y training, work & consulting.
Barefoot Web-slave, antique illustrations:  http://www.fromoldbooks.org