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Re: XLink olden days

• To: Uche Ogbuji <uche.ogbuji@f...>
• Subject: Re: XLink olden days
• From: Paul Prescod <paul@p...>
• Date: Sun, 11 Aug 2002 08:26:32 -0400
• Cc: xml-dev@l..., Tim Berners-Lee <timbl@w...>
• References: <E17dddl-0005RV-00@m...>

Uche Ogbuji wrote:
> 
> ...
> 
> Listen, folks.  XML *needs* a general and credible linking specification.

According to the PTB, XLink is not intended to be a general linking
specification:

"The scope of XLink is hypertext linking. A motivation for XLink was to
give to languages for human documents a much richer form of hypertext
than HTML, with features which had in fact been used in hypertext
products for many years before the web.

A counter-example is the speech grammar specification, which uses a URI
parameter to refer to a piece of grammar in an external file. This
logical information is not intended to be browsed by people as a
document. There is no need for the hypertext functionality of Xlink.
There is no need to clutter the language with xlink:href syntax."


> ... I have long expressed support/desire for an RDF serialization 
> that uses XLink, and in the little experimentation I've undertaken, 
> I also don't see the insurmountable problems XLink poses.

This is exactly the kind of use that is outside of the realm of
hypertext. Naughty!

Some of my other thoughts on this issue:

 * http://www.prescod.net/xml/xlink_popularity/

""The W3C suggests that XLink is for document-like data. Roughly
speaking, document-like data is data that is processed by a machine only
to directly display for human beings. It makes no sense to restrict
XLink in this way and actually harms the growth of XLink even in this
market.

First, the very distinction is bogus. A well-written XML schema will
have significant documentation in it and will be equally useful for
machines and humans. Should the schema therefore use XLink or not? The
very genious of XML is that it integrates the data and document
processing worlds.

Second, XLink will not achieve economies of scale if it is restricted to
only a small subset of the XML processing world. For instance, if I
developed link checking software I would want to sell it to people
making both "document-style" and "data-style" XML. If my software needs
to deal with a variety of linking styles then I get no benefit from
XLink whatsoever. I will just end up treating it as one more style.

Third, XLink is already more popular in data-like vocabularies than in
document-like ones. The W3C should support this trend, not deprecate it.
The W3C should use a single linking standard for all types of documents
without making an artificial distinction between document-like and
data-like vocabularies.""

-- 
XML, Web Services Architecture, REST Architectural Style
Consulting, training, programming: http://www.constantrevolution.com
Come discuss XML and REST web services at the Extreme Markup Conference

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