[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] RE: multidirectional links with XLINK
>Reading the X-Link-Specification I found the keyword >multidirectional-link, but I had no idea how to realize it with X-Link. >What´s the difference to, for instance, two uni-directional links, one >on each side? (I'll give it a shot; all corrections welcome.) XLink lets you declare linking elements that have the job of defining links (that is, identifying relationships) between resources. Let's say I declare an element type called myLink that I'll use to link pairs of web pages having a certain relationship. Once a given myLink element defines a relationship between http://foo.com/a.html and http://bar.com/b.html, that link may be implemented in such a way that someone at either end of the link can travel to the other link, unless I used XLink's arc feature to restrict such travel in myLink links. With no use of the arc feature, it's one single myLink linking element defining a multidirectional link. Because you can't do this in HTML, you would implement the same idea with two <A HREF="..." NAME="...">, one in http://foo.com/a.html and one in http://bar.com/b.html, and each pointing at the other. It may look the same to the end user following the links, but two uni-directional A elements were necessary to code it instead of a single myLink element. By "realize," I guess you mean "implement." Just as the XML spec tells how you might define an EMPHASIS element type but doesn't tell you how to implement your emphasis (e.g. when converting to HTML, you might use Perl to convert an EMPHASIS element to a B element), XLink doesn't tell you about implementation either. (Well, it drops hints here and there, and I look forward to implementers picking up on these hints, but they're waiting for it to reach Recommendation status.) Instead, it tells you how to define and encode relationships. For now, the implementation of such a myLink link element could mean writing out as many <A HREF="..." NAME="..."> elements as are necessary, if you have write access to the linked resources, or reading the pages in and inserting the links in a copy or...whatever. Like I said, I look forward to implementations that let us really have fun with these cool XLink features. Bob DuCharme www.snee.com/bob <bob@ snee.com> see www.snee.com/bob/xmlann for "XML: The Annotated Specification" from Prentice Hall. xml-dev: A list for W3C XML Developers. To post, mailto:xml-dev@i... Archived as: http://www.lists.ic.ac.uk/hypermail/xml-dev/ and on CD-ROM/ISBN 981-02-3594-1 To (un)subscribe, mailto:majordomo@i... the following message; (un)subscribe xml-dev To subscribe to the digests, mailto:majordomo@i... the following message; subscribe xml-dev-digest List coordinator, Henry Rzepa (mailto:rzepa@i...)
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