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Re: linking, 80/20

• To: xml-dev@l...
• Subject: Re: linking, 80/20
• From: "Simon St.Laurent" <simonstl@s...>
• Date: Sun, 18 Aug 2002 09:26:58 -0400
• In-reply-to: <20020817155213.D18909@t...>

[Once again, Liam's message doesn't appear to have reached the list.]

Liam Quin writes:
> On Sat, Aug 17, 2002 at 03:43:04PM -0400, Simon St.Laurent wrote:
> [...]
> 
> > While I appreciate the need to do more than HTML 1.0, I also think 
> it's
> > pretty obvious that a much wider segment of the world is happy with
> > href, src, and longdesc than is interested in either complex links
or
> > RDF.
> 
> True.  Well, RDf is a mechanism for representing metadata, something
> most people aren't interested in to begin with.  Of course, most
> people haven't made a 'phone call yet, either :-)
> 
> > Allowing href on everything - whether or not it has the unnecessary
> > xlink: namespace slapped on it - is a much larger advance in making
> > hypertext broadly useful than any attempt to rewrite XHTML to take
> > advantage of complex links.
> 
> Agreed.
> 
> I think a useful way to think of RDF is not that it, as a whole, is
> something anyone wants, but rather that it provides a framework in
> which a whole bunch of people cna do stuff they want and need to do,
> and have the result be interoperable, so the same tools work on all
> the data and the same data works in all the tools.
> 
> Simple markup that happens to conform to the RDF rec, but is useful
> in its own right and easy to understand, has a whole bunch of
> benefits.
> 
> I'm not sure if that has much to do with XLink and 80/20 though.

I was just citing RDF as a technology which I think offers an even more
complicated but more powerful set of linking tools (in its typical XML
form, at any rate), and as something which I suspect misses the 80/20
point for most HTML developers currently.

There's kind of a continuum from simple usage to elegant abstraction:

----  HTML  -------  XLink  -----  RDF  ----

Depending on the application, one or more of these may fit your needs,
but a lot of people (myself included) tend to loiter on the left-hand
side of that continuum, seeing little benefit relative to the costs
imposed by moving to the right.


-------------
Simon St.Laurent - SSL is my TLA
http://simonstl.com may be my URI
http://monasticxml.com may be my ascetic URI
urn:oid:1.3.6.1.4.1.6320 is another possibility altogether

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