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Re: Re: Can XLink be fixed?

• To: xml-dev@l...
• Subject: Re: Re: Can XLink be fixed?
• From: Joe English <jenglish@f...>
• Date: Wed, 14 Aug 2002 14:24:16 -0700
• In-reply-to: <87ofc5tivg.fsf@n...>
• References: <87ofc5tivg.fsf@n...> <f3.1f45acab.2a84eada@a...> <87sn1ifz8d.fsf@n...>

Norman Walsh wrote:

> In conversations today on the XML Linking WG, prompted by Erik Wilde's
> proposal for an XLink Data Model[1], I was reminded of another
> possible solution. [...]
>
> This other alternative answer is to use infoset augmentation. By
> modeling linking semantics in terms of additions to the infoset, we
> can make a clear separation between the syntactic constructs used to
> identify links and their meaning.

I think this is an excellent idea.

> So, for example, an HTML browser can construct appropriate link
> information items from HREF, SRC, and LONGDESC attributes in the XHTML
> by appealing to its own understanding of the XHTML vocabulary.
> Similarly, an XLink-aware application can construct them from XLink
> 1.0 attributes.

> As an added bonus, this method allows an application that understands
> links to treat both simple and extended links uniformly. It operates
> on the linking data model without regard to how that was constructed,
> whether the links expressed came originally from simple links in the
> source document or a set of external linkbases.

... or a CSS-like "linking stylesheet," or an AF-like processor,
or a validator, or any number of other pre-processing transformations.
This would allow a lot of flexibility in how XLink could be
applied.

> On the other hand, this is an, uhm, LSI, and is sure to be greeted by
> some with the same enthusiasm as the PSVI :-).


AFAICT, it's not so much the idea of an augmented infoset
that people find disagreeable about the PSVI, it's the
nature (and quantity!) of the data that a W3C XML Schema
validator adds to the Infoset.

Come to think of it, if the Infoset augmentation is expressed
as a set of attributes with a distinguished namespace name,
instead of as a new set of [information item]s, then
the current XLink draft could work unchanged.  You just
need to explicitly state that the xlink:* attributes need
not be present in the source document, and may instead
be added by some (unspecified) preprocessing transformation.


--Joe English

  jenglish@f...

• Follow-Ups:
  • Re: Re: Can XLink be fixed?
    • From: Paul Prescod <paul@p...>
  • Re: Re: Can XLink be fixed?
    • From: Norman Walsh <ndw@n...>
  • Re: Re: Can XLink be fixed?
    • From: "Simon St.Laurent" <simonstl@s...>

• References:
  • Re: Can XLink be fixed?
    • From: Norman Walsh <ndw@n...>
  • XHTML 2.0 and the death of XLink and XPointer?
    • From: AndrewWatt2000@a...
  • Can XLink be fixed?
    • From: Norman Walsh <ndw@n...>

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