Re: XLink and OLink in Docbook 5

[Jirka Kosek <jirka@kosek.cz>]

Sam Steingold wrote:

> Now, IIUC, <olink> is gone from Docbook 5.
> XLink, as I can glean from a cursory look at <http://www.w3.org/TR/xlink/>,
> uses URIs, and is therefore equivalent to the old <ulink>.

No, it isn't. Ulink is used to point to some resource on the web. In 
context of DocBook it is usually chunked or non-chunked HTML or PDF 
version of document. But if you will use XLink as replacement for olink 
you will use URIs of *source DocBook document* not URIs of transformed 
and processed documents. This is a big difference.

And if you for some reason don't like URLs and you want something 
completely location independent and indirect, you can use URNs. So instead:

<olink targetdoc="UserGuide" targetptr="ch.Configuration">blabla</olink>

you can use

<link xlink:href="urn:x-sam:UserGuide#ch.Configuration">blabla</link>

and even

<link xlink:href="UserGuide#ch.Configuration">blabla</link>

will be valid from URI point of view, but not 100% technically correct. 
In fact there is no big difference in olink and XLink based linking in 
DocBook 5.

> So what is the recommended way to create inter-document link in Docbook 5?
> E.g., I have a <book> and a <refentry> which link to each other.
> I produce 2 versions of html from <book>: chunked and single file.
> I produce 1 html version of <refentry> (but it is heavily
> post-processed).

It depends on processing tools you are using. But in general you should 
use something like:

<link xlink:href="book.xml#foo">blabla</link>

and

<link xlink:href="refentry.xml#bar">blabla</link>

or URNs as described above.

I hope that it is clear now and that I chased your concerns away.

					Jirka

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