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On Fri, September 22, 2006 7:37 am, Ben Trafford wrote: > A lot of the mindset was influenced by the SGML world, and a > lot of the work was influenced by the priorities at the W3C, which > were to get things out as quickly as possible, to cement XML's legitimacy. I think that this was part of XLink's problem: the SGML influence was on how to model links so that they could be converted to links in multiple media, and the W3C (HTML) influence was on how to specify link behavior in browsers (with lots of accessibility caveats thrown in to make it clear that the spec was talking about ideal browsers of the future), and specification for modeling links with specification for implementing them, however generalized, made it a messy spec. What Michael said earlier in this thread bears repeating: ...the big mistake in XLink is a failure to recognize that there are two separate things: a relationship between pieces of information, and a navigable hyperlink. We've achieved the separation of content from presentation in other areas, we just haven't achieved it for relationships. The presentation forms do need better navigation facilities, and core XML also needs (much) better facilities for modeling relationships. Which is why I disagree with this: > In an ideal world, a lot of XLink would've gone into the > styling languages. XLink doesn't belong in a styling language like XSL-FO any more than chapter and title elements do. Just as we use XSLT to convert from DocBook semantic markup indicating chapters and titles to both HTML and XSL-FO equivalents, as appropriate, I'd rather see XLink add to the richness of the semantic relationships expressed within DocBook and other semantic markup schemas so that XSLT can convert that markup to hypertext links, or TOCs, or endnotes, or popups, or whatever is appropriate for the output medium in question. I wrote a lot more about this in my old O'Reilly blog, which focused on linking (http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/au/1191, click on "BLOG"). Elliot Kimber has also been writing some interesting stuff on linking in his weblog recently (http://drmacros-xml-rants.blogspot.com/). Bob http://www.snee.com/bobdc.blog
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