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RE: XLINK support in browsers

• To: "'Ben Trafford'" <ben@p...>,<xml-dev@l...>
• Subject: RE: XLINK support in browsers
• From: "Michael Kay" <mike@s...>
• Date: Sun, 3 Apr 2005 19:29:23 +0100
• In-reply-to: <6.2.1.2.2.20050403133942.03a70cd8@m...>
• Thread-index: AcU4dVzZ4iyU1a1vRribtecDEd5S6wAA2FAQ

>          How would you define a link within an XML document? 
> No external 
> schemas. No stylesheets. You're an author, who has zero control over 
> presentation, beyond using tags. In much the same way you 
> might use an 
> <emphasis> tag to emphasize a given word, you want something 
> so that you 
> can indicate that -this text here- is linked to -this text in 
> that document 
> over there-. They have an implicit, unidirectional 
> relationship. -This- can 
> take you to -that-.


Firstly, wherever possible, I would not link to "text" but to an object, and
I would refer to that object by user-meaningful identifiers, not by URIs. If
I want to refer to a city, I would write the element as <city name="London"
country="gb"/>. That way, I have abstracted the information content from
presentation issues, and left maximum flexibility for the rendering
processes to decide how to present the information. To use the distinction
that I think someone was making, I would use a relationship rather than a
link. If the rendering process wishes to translate my city reference into a
link into Wikipedia, rendered as an image of the coat of arms of the city in
question, then it's free to do so.

(As you see, I'm not a fan of the idea of using URIs to refer to real-world
objects as distinct from machine-readable resources.)

If I actually want to refer to a document, or to a place within a document,
rather than to a real-world object, then I would try to use tags that
reflect the reason for linking to that document, for example

<defined-at>http://www.w3.org/TR/xslt20#template-rule</defined-at>

Michael Kay 

• References:
  • RE: XLINK support in browsers
    • From: Ben Trafford <ben@p...>

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