XML.orgXML.org
FOCUS AREAS |XML-DEV |XML.org DAILY NEWSLINK |REGISTRY |RESOURCES |ABOUT
OASIS Mailing List ArchivesView the OASIS mailing list archive below
or browse/search using MarkMail.

 


Help: OASIS Mailing Lists Help | MarkMail Help

[Date Prev] | [Thread Prev] | [Thread Next] | [Date Next] -- [Date Index] | [Thread Index]
Re: [xml-dev] Re: ***SPAM*** [xml-dev] Resource relationships

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



[Date Prev] | [Thread Prev] | [Thread Next] | [Date Next] -- [Date Index] | [Thread Index]


News | XML in Industry | Calendar | XML Registry
Marketplace | Resources | MyXML.org | Sponsors | Privacy Statement

Copyright 1993-2007 XML.org. This site is hosted by OASIS