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

[Hans-Juergen Rennau <hrennau@yahoo.de>]

One thing in your comments makes me wonder - they seem to presuppose that "the browser" is the primary user-agent concerned with potential benefits. This may have been true 10 years ago, but is it still true? Am I mistaken to think that our economy by now heavily depends on web-services, above all REST based, in the cloud and on premise, and that links should be an important means of integrating information?

Am Samstag, 13. Juni 2020, 20:09:10 MESZ hat Tim Bray <tbray@textuality.com> Folgendes geschrieben:

I'm still disappointed about XLink's failure to catch on.  I still think it'd solve significant real-world problems that I still encounter.  But obviously the browser builders didn't see it that way and maybe they were right.  That said, at the point in history when XLink appeared, the browser-builder politics and dysfunction were pretty nasty, so perhaps there's an element of bad luck at work.  Can't complain too much, XML enjoyed a massive stroke of good luck by arriving at a time when there was no decent open interchange format at all and a massive undiscovered hunger for such a thing.

On Sat, Jun 13, 2020 at 9:35 AM Liam R. E. Quin <liam@fromoldbooks.org> 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.

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


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