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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 17:13:37 +0100
• Cc: xml-dev@l...
• In-reply-to: <r02000200-1028-5D5545744DB011D8BABF0003937A08C2@[192.168.124.11]>
• References: <r02000200-1028-5D5545744DB011D8BABF0003937A08C2@[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:
>>Blunt is fine, but this particular instance is tragically unhelpful.
>>Why is it ridiculous on its face, does it have a big red shiny nose or
>>something?
> 
> Ah, "tragically unhelpful".  I take it that means that we're getting
> close to the heart of the problem.

It looks like it :)

> WHY "ONE LINKING MECHANISM TO RULE THEM ALL" IS RIDICULOUS

[snip very interesting exposé]

I think different things can be meant by "generic linking". One is 
"capture all possible linking constructs" which you describe, and which 
I agree is over-ambitious. Another is "no matter what vocabulary you're 
fed, you can still tell when something is a (simple) link (and which 
bloody specific kind you couldn't possibly care less about)".

I want the latter. I need something that's just one notch above 
heuristics based on attribute local names and regexen, and doesn't 
require knowing the given grammar, but stops short of telling me 
everything in various clumsy ways and leaves all further complexity to 
the grammar itself. As such, even HLink might be going too far (even 
though I could live with it).

I agree that XLink fails in being too ambitious, but I'm happier with 
the ability to just look for @xlink:href than with nothing at all.

Perhaps xml-dev could kill this particular permathread with a concrete 
proposal?

-- 
Robin Berjon

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