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RE: [Fwd: The problems with Xlink for integration langu ages]

• To: 'Elliotte Rusty Harold' <elharo@m...>, Jeni Tennison <jeni@j...>
• Subject: RE: [Fwd: The problems with Xlink for integration langu ages]
• From: Micah Dubinko <MDubinko@c...>
• Date: Wed, 18 Sep 2002 13:51:07 -0700
• Cc: xml-dev@l...

Elliotte was talking about using simple XLink for something like this:

<img>
  <href xlink:href="url_for_image"/>
  <longdesc xlink:href="url_for_longdesc"/>
  ...
</img>

In general, it's not good to use XLink in a way that is misleading to a
generic XLink processor. To an XLink spider with no knowledge of the XML
language containing the links, the above would be indistinguishable from:

<my_bookmarks>
  <bookmark xlink:href="url_for_bookmark"/>
  <bookmark xlink:href="url_for_bookmark"/>
  ...
</my_bookmarks>

In other words, it's a different linking structure (multiple links actually)
than the intended one-to-many link.

Similar logic follows for uses of extended links that omit the local
resource element, arc elements, etc. Not saying what you mean considered
harmful. At the same time, hand authors revolt against the "verbose" syntax,
and we end up where we are today.

Thanks,

.micah

-----Original Message-----
From: Elliotte Rusty Harold [mailto:elharo@m...]
Sent: Wednesday, September 18, 2002 7:30 AM
To: Jeni Tennison
Cc: xml-dev@l...
Subject: Re:  [Fwd: The problems with Xlink for integration
langu ages]


At 10:22 AM +0100 9/18/02, Jeni Tennison wrote:


>Err, OK. I thought that you'd want to say "here's an image, here's a
>description of the image, here's a map file of the image, here's the
>alternative text for the image" -- in other words that it's somehow
>important conceptually that the src, description, map and alt are
>describing the same *thing*.

Yes, but this is provided by the parent img element.The parent img 
element can have a map file that is the map for this image. It can 
have an alt element that is the alt text for this image, etc. This is 
pretty normal XML. You do not have to use an attribute to associate 
two pieces of information together. In fact, at one extreme you could 
eliminate attributes completely. I'm not suggesting that, but lets 
not go building massive architectures just so we can use attributes 
when an element based solution is so much simpler.
-- 

+-----------------------+------------------------+-------------------+
| Elliotte Rusty Harold | elharo@m... | Writer/Programmer |
+-----------------------+------------------------+-------------------+
|          XML in a  Nutshell, 2nd Edition (O'Reilly, 2002)          |
|              http://www.cafeconleche.org/books/xian2/              |
|  http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN%3D0596002920/cafeaulaitA/  |
+----------------------------------+---------------------------------+
|  Read Cafe au Lait for Java News:  http://www.cafeaulait.org/      |
|  Read Cafe con Leche for XML News: http://www.cafeconleche.org/    |
+----------------------------------+---------------------------------+

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