Uche Ogbuji writes:
> Thanks for the history. It's a fun read. I was hoping that it would
> shed some light on the technical problems the XHTML folks encountered
> in trying to use XLink. IOW, they don't really help explain current
> arguments to me. And why in particular do you think namespaces are a
> problem in XLink? The only point I've heard from the XHTML folks so
> far wrt XMLNS are that the XLink namespace is extra to type. Surely
> this isn't what you mean?
I think the notion is that XLink was originally a toolkit for describing
linking semantics, which used an architectural forms [based|like]
transformation to connect those semantics to other vocabularies. There
was a vocabulary, but you didn't have to use that vocabulary explicitly
thanks to the remapping.
In later drafts, post-namespaces, XLink became just a vocabulary. To
use XLink, you must use attributes in the XLink namespace. While in
some ways this just a shift from the abstract to the concrete, it's a
pretty large imposition on vocabularies that already have linking
semantics (like HTML - not just A but images, forms, objects, etc.).
For yet a different approach to squaring this circle, see:
http://www.w3.org/TR/xlink-naming/
I'm not sure I particularly love any of these mechanisms, but I can
certainly see why the XHTML folks are angry.
--
Simon St.Laurent
Ring around the content, a pocket full of brackets
Errors, errors, all fall down!
http://simonstl.com
