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Re: linking, 80/20

• To: xml-dev@l...
• Subject: Re: linking, 80/20
• From: "Simon St.Laurent" <simonstl@s...>
• Date: Sun, 18 Aug 2002 09:13:58 -0400
• In-reply-to: <3D5EB23A.F74BA6F7@p...>

Paul Prescod writes:
> John Cowan wrote:
> > I agree, actually.  But it wouldn't cost them anything to use
> > xlink:href (and a #FIXED attribute of xlink:type="simple") and it
> > would make generalized link harvesters that much more useful.
> 
> I disagree. There is a cognitive load imposed by requiring authors to
> remember what namespaces various features of their markup language
> come from. RDF for metadata. DC for a particular ontology. XLink for
> linking. XForms for forms. HTML's original virtue was how easy it was
> to learn and remember. 

I'm completely with Paul.  While developers are likely to be willing to
'figure out what those stupid prefixes are for' if they're doing
something genuinely new and different - like embedding XForms, SVG or
MathML - I don't think the same applies to revised versions of an
existing spec that was originally designed with humans in mind.

(Please don't give me that crap about all the markup being hidden by
tools - too much good XHTML practice still resolves around hand-editing,
and markup was supposed to be a useful meeting place for humans and
machines, not an opaque format.)

I have a very hard time seeing what value using the xlink namespace adds
to XHTML.  John thinks the cost is minimal, but I think the cost is very
real for people who are not XML folks.  Well-formedness also has a cost,
but the benefits from that seem [divide-by-zero error, and a large
number if I count any benefit for the namespace use] times greater than
those of using the XLink namespace in XHTML.

That said, I think something like Erik Wilde's proposal of looking at
XLink as an abstraction and permitting the mapping of components from
other vocabularies into that abstraction works well.  

Link harvesters shouldn't need a whole lot of training to figure out
that "href==(xlink:href xlink:type='simple') in XHTML."   This is a
pretty easy transformation.  In fact, an "XHTML to explicit XLink" XSLT
stylesheet should be pretty trivial, especially if all you want is to
build tools which harvest the links.

(For our next question, I'd like to take bets on how many times
namespaces will prove a hassle for HTML's development... So far we've
had the three-namespaces battle and now this one, so two by my count.)


-------------
Simon St.Laurent - SSL is my TLA
http://simonstl.com may be my URI
http://monasticxml.com may be my ascetic URI
urn:oid:1.3.6.1.4.1.6320 is another possibility altogether

• Follow-Ups:
  • RE: linking, 80/20
    • From: "Jelks Cabaniss" <jelks@j...>
  • Re: linking, 80/20
    • From: Ann Navarro <ann@w...>
  • Re: linking, 80/20
    • From: Paul Prescod <paul@p...>

• References:
  • Re: linking, 80/20
    • From: Paul Prescod <paul@p...>

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