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XLink and mixed vocabulary design

• To: "'DuCharme, Bob (LNG-CHO)'" <bob.ducharme@l...>, XML Developer List <xml-dev@l...>
• Subject: XLink and mixed vocabulary design
• From: Micah Dubinko <MDubinko@c...>
• Date: Wed, 21 Jan 2004 11:14:54 -0800

I think I understand the idea behind the design of XLink. Here's an example
of how it breaks down.

Say, in XHTML2, you have a form label. <label>

Now, you want the content of the label to come from an out-of-document
source.

XLink : <label xlink:href="sometext.html" xlink:type="simple"
xlink:show="embed" xlink:actuate="onLoad">...
XHTML2: <label src="sometext.html">...

Now, to the same element, you want to establish a conventional link, so that
users can "click" on it and navigate to another page.

XHTML2: <label src="sometext.html" href="gohere.html">...
XLink : ???

When combining vocabularies, the chances of something like this happening
increase exponentially. Refactoring (so that the above construct would use
two elements), or using complex links often is either not possible or too
much hassle when you simply want to combine two pre-defined vocabularies.

.micah

-----Original Message-----
From: DuCharme, Bob (LNG-CHO) [mailto:bob.ducharme@l...]
Sent: Wednesday, January 21, 2004 11:23 AM
To: XML Developer List
Subject: RE:  RDDL(2): new version up


>>Why does XLink have problems with mixed vocabularies?

>Because it uses a single attribute name (xlink:href) for multiple purposes.

The idea is that instead of using n different attributes for n purposes, one
attribute, href, is used to identify the URL and others
(http://www.w3.org/TR/xlink/#link-semantics) are used to identify the
purpose.

Bob

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