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Re: XHTML 2.0 and the death of XLink and XPointer?

• To: xml-dev@l...
• Subject: Re: XHTML 2.0 and the death of XLink and XPointer?
• From: "Simon St.Laurent" <simonstl@s...>
• Date: Mon, 12 Aug 2002 13:55:20 -0400
• In-reply-to: <4.3.2.7.2.20020812123854.02479a00@m...>

Ann Navarro writes:
> Our last call comments, which were rejected outright, can be found at
> 
> http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-xml-linking-comments/
> 2000JanMar/0073.html

There's a beautiful paragraph in there which seems to sum up what
happened to XLink:

> However, sometime in 1999, Xlink stopped describing linking, and
> started being it. This is a major change, because all of a sudden you
> are forced to change your documents if you want to use Xlink, even
> though the current Xlink draft still claims it is a requirement that
> documents not need to be changed.

That's a very concise description of what the shift from architectural
forms to namespaces did to XLink.  There are some other brittle bits of
XLink that make it tough to use with XHTML, like the
one-link-per-element issue, requiring even more rejiggering.

My guess at this point is that XLink is wonderful for applications which
view linking precisely as XLink does, and a pretty complete waste of
time for applications which have other perspectives.  Linking seems to
produce as many perspectives as schemas, and maybe it's time to stop
trying to enforce "there can be only one".

-- 
Simon St.Laurent
Ring around the content, a pocket full of brackets
Errors, errors, all fall down!
http://simonstl.com

• Follow-Ups:
  • Re: XHTML 2.0 and the death of XLink and XPointer?
    • From: "Christopher R. Maden" <crism@m...>

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  • Re: XHTML 2.0 and the death of XLink and XPointer?
    • From: Ann Navarro <ann@w...>

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