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

Re: XLink and mixed vocabulary design

• To: "Simon St.Laurent" <simonstl@s...>
• Subject: Re: XLink and mixed vocabulary design
• From: Robin Berjon <robin.berjon@e...>
• Date: Fri, 23 Jan 2004 16:52:30 +0100
• Cc: XML Developer List <xml-dev@l...>
• In-reply-to: <r02000200-1028-FFAB50E44CFC11D8BABF0003937A08C2@[192.168.124.11]>
• References: <r02000200-1028-FFAB50E44CFC11D8BABF0003937A08C2@[192.168.124.11]>
• User-agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X Mach-O; en-US; rv:1.6b) Gecko/20031205 Thunderbird/0.4

Simon St.Laurent wrote:
> There is an element of chicken-and-egg to it.  Still, even when I was
> presenting on XLink regularly, I never had anyone ask about this.  I'm
> aware of very few XLink link-harvesters, though I think STEP UK had one
> long ago.

I've used generic XLinks to find out about dependencies between XML 
documents in a variety of arbitrary vocabularies, and I've found it 
useful. I'm not in love with XLink itself, but I'd rather have it than 
nothing.

> I suspect we can argue about "basic", but to me this:
> 
> <img src="thumbnail.jpg" href="fullpicture.jpg" />
> 
> makes far more sense than:
> <a href="fullpicture.jpg"><img src="thumbnail.jpg" /></a>
> 
> I don't see the need for two elements to represent that functionality.
> It seems to clutter language design and complicate document structures
> to no particular purpose.  (And yes, I use that pattern constantly.  See
> http://simonstl.com/dryden/archives/000095.html for an example using my
> house.)

I remain fairly unconvinced, even if images are the one case that gets 
closest to making sense. However to hop just one bump up from this 
ultra-simple example, if I want to link an image and a bit of text, 
would you recommend:

   <img src='thumb.jpg' href='fullpicture.jpg'/>
   <span href='fullpicture.jpg'>Simon's nice house</span>

or

   <a href='fullpicture.jpg'>
     <img src='thumb.jpg'/> <span>Simon's nice house</span>
   </a>

? The former seems to me quite wasteful in its redundancy, implying in 
turn that you need anchors, and since <a> it hardly a huge waste of 
characters why not use it always? A "nice-to-have" shorthand that breaks 
down for anything but the simplest cases hardly seems to justify the 
dropping of a more powerful feature.

And even then, that could be made generic. There's no need for it to be 
vocabulary specific.

> Bad sex is not pretty good, IMHO.

Still beats XHTML 2 linking though :p

-- 
Robin Berjon

• Follow-Ups:
  • Re: XLink and mixed vocabulary design
    • From: "Simon St.Laurent" <simonstl@s...>

• References:
  • Re: XLink and mixed vocabulary design
    • From: "Simon St.Laurent" <simonstl@s...>

• Prev by Date: RE: XLink and mixed vocabulary design
• Next by Date: RE: XLink and mixed vocabulary design
• Previous by thread: Re: XLink and mixed vocabulary design
• Next by thread: Re: XLink and mixed vocabulary design
• Index(es):
  • Date
  • Thread