[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message]

Re: Are hyperlinks presentation or content?

• To: xml-dev@l...
• Subject: Re: Are hyperlinks presentation or content?
• From: Elliotte Rusty Harold <elharo@m...>
• Date: Tue, 1 Oct 2002 09:53:58 -0400
• In-reply-to: <3D98C0B5.3080208@p...>
• References: <DB2AFE51-D4B8-11D6-B95B-0003938E7308@t...><3D98C0B5.3080208@p...>

All this CSS vs. linking debate about whether links are presentation 
or content reminds me of something I wrote several years ago in the 
XML Bible. Maybe they're neither, or, less proscriptively, maybe they 
don't have to be either. Quoting myself:

This expands the abstraction of style sheets into the linking domain. 
A style sheet is completely separate from the document it describes 
and yet provides rules that modify how the document is presented to 
the reader. A linkbase containing out-of-line links is separated from 
the documents it connects, yet it provides the necessary links to the 
reader. This has several advantages, including keeping more 
presentation-oriented markup separate from the document and allowing 
the linking of read-only documents.

XLink specifically enables the possibility of "link sheets", and 
allows the application of different links sheets to one document. Of 
course, this would be out-of-line markup that required a separate 
processing step, but if this is an interesting use-case, then that is 
what you need.

-- 

+-----------------------+------------------------+-------------------+
| 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/    |
+----------------------------------+---------------------------------+

• Prev by Date: XPath/XSLT 2.0 concerns
• Next by Date: Re: XPath/XSLT 2.0 concerns
• Previous by thread: Re: Are hyperlinks presentation or content?
• Next by thread: Re: Are hyperlinks presentation or content?
• Index(es):
  • Date
  • Thread