[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] Re: XLink and mixed vocabulary design
Simon St.Laurent wrote: > There is an element of chicken-and-egg to it. Still, even when I was > presenting on XLink regularly, I never had anyone ask about this. I'm > aware of very few XLink link-harvesters, though I think STEP UK had one > long ago. I've used generic XLinks to find out about dependencies between XML documents in a variety of arbitrary vocabularies, and I've found it useful. I'm not in love with XLink itself, but I'd rather have it than nothing. > I suspect we can argue about "basic", but to me this: > > <img src="thumbnail.jpg" href="fullpicture.jpg" /> > > makes far more sense than: > <a href="fullpicture.jpg"><img src="thumbnail.jpg" /></a> > > I don't see the need for two elements to represent that functionality. > It seems to clutter language design and complicate document structures > to no particular purpose. (And yes, I use that pattern constantly. See > http://simonstl.com/dryden/archives/000095.html for an example using my > house.) I remain fairly unconvinced, even if images are the one case that gets closest to making sense. However to hop just one bump up from this ultra-simple example, if I want to link an image and a bit of text, would you recommend: <img src='thumb.jpg' href='fullpicture.jpg'/> <span href='fullpicture.jpg'>Simon's nice house</span> or <a href='fullpicture.jpg'> <img src='thumb.jpg'/> <span>Simon's nice house</span> </a> ? The former seems to me quite wasteful in its redundancy, implying in turn that you need anchors, and since <a> it hardly a huge waste of characters why not use it always? A "nice-to-have" shorthand that breaks down for anything but the simplest cases hardly seems to justify the dropping of a more powerful feature. And even then, that could be made generic. There's no need for it to be vocabulary specific. > Bad sex is not pretty good, IMHO. Still beats XHTML 2 linking though :p -- Robin Berjon
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