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[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] Re: XML, hypertext
 Bob DuCharme writes: > But to get back to my original question: what do you see an XML-based > hypertext effort as adding, and to what? Well, actually I want my HyperCard back. ;-> I don't actually see XML or markup as fundamental to hypertext, though it certainly looked like the "best way" when I was coming into XML from HTML. (I think I told you at Extreme that I looked at HyTime when I was first looking past HyperCard, and convinced myself that markup would go nowhere, thereby losing a year I could have spent with HTML - which I heard of a week later, actually, because of Cornell's "cello" work, but stupidly ignored.) What I'd like isn't so much "an XML-based hypertext effort" as some hard looks at the intersection between hypertext and markup. I think XLink has demonstrated that specifying links in markup isn't necessarily a natural-feeling process, and XPointer's xpointer() scheme demonstrates that specifying endpoints in marked-up documents is also non-trivial. To go back, > What do you see as missing here that needs to be added? Do you want a > standard that lets us use the original XML natively on the rendering > devices, in which case we need to mix in some presentation > information with the structural information? (Which of course sets > off a buzzer in my old SGML head...) I think we've mistaken the odd tools we have for the tools we need. There's very little connection between XLink and the style specifications, which may be driving your concern about mixing presentation and structure. The one document on the subject [1] is really pretty exclusively about XSLT-styling, and I don't think anyone claims it's a complete answer even within that domain. There was some really excellent stuff at Extreme that gave me yet more ideas and which more importantly convinced me that there's a lot left to figure out. I won't try to sell anyone on my Ool stuff, but some of the work on overlapping markup made sense to me as a set of tools with hypertext specifically in mind, and the range algebra stuff looks like some serious firepower for using text as a foundation for hypertext and markup. XML and hypertext are both cool things. I'm not sure that they're a natural fit, however, and I'm definitely not sure that we've reached the point where it's obvious how best to do linking in XML. I'd love to see an informal group of people who discuss different approaches over time for a while, and possibly some kind of catalog of approaches. While I was really impatient early on that XLink took so long, I think its long development cycle and current relative insignificance give us a good chance to look at alternatives before locking into a particular approach. [1] - XML Linking and Style - http://www.w3.org/TR/xml-link-style/ -- Simon St.Laurent Ring around the content, a pocket full of brackets Errors, errors, all fall down! http://simonstl.com 
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