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

[Peter Flynn <peter@silmaril.ie>]

On 13/06/2020 17:35, Liam R. E. Quin wrote:
> 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.
Plus it had no obvious adoption in the wide world. No browser rushed to 
provide an implementation that designers could see the benefits of.

> 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.
Absolutely, except that by then a DTD was a dirty word on the web.

> [...] HTML already had a/@href and img/@src, and these can be used in
> XML DTDs as easily as XLink.
It's not that they can be used in DTDs, it's that they already existed 
in HTML, and the browser-makers were not convinced that XLink offered 
anything of value. Plus a lot of players didn't really understand XML 
anyway, so anything beginning with "X" was a non-starter.

> 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.
There are many things that could have been done if the relevant people 
were actually paying attention to the technology, but I think they 
simply didn't find it useful. Lots of people still prefer to do things 
the hard way because it looks simpler.

> [...] Note that XLink permits multiple links on an element, 
Which takes us back to Panorama, which implemented multiple links in 
Netscape in the 1990s. Click and you get a drop-down: pick one. But at 
the time it needed knowledge and skill to encode it, and an SGML plugin :-)

Plus ça change.

Peter