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Re: Re: Can XLink be fixed?

• To: xml-dev@l...
• Subject: Re: Re: Can XLink be fixed?
• From: "Simon St.Laurent" <simonstl@s...>
• Date: Thu, 15 Aug 2002 13:35:18 -0400
• In-reply-to: <3D5BE383.5070405@t...>

Tim Bray wrote:
> Having said that, I think that certain HTML idioms, such as
> 
> <img src="URL of picture" alt="local text" longdesc="URL of text">
> 
> are really bad markup design and aren't worth grandfathering.  Why
> bad? Suppose you want to have descriptions (long or short) in more
> than one language, and suppose you want to provide multiple sizes of
> the picture, etc; 

The URI people keep telling me that's a job for content-negotiation,
providing multiple representations of a single resource.  I guess
there's a good question about whether the longdesc resource is just a
representation of the same resource identified by the src attribute...
How deep do you really want to go with this?

Alt text in multiple languages might be handy, I agree.

> in fact, while you can argue about the appropriate
> uses of elements and attributes almost forever, this is a good
> example of how not to use attributes.  

I dunno about that, unless maybe we want to get into requiring all
URI-containing values to be child elements rather than elements.  I
don't see any reason that src and longdesc don't both qualify as
metadata about the img element, though I'm sure I could come up with
something vaguely plausible.

-- 
Simon St.Laurent
Ring around the content, a pocket full of brackets
Errors, errors, all fall down!
http://simonstl.com

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