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Re: XLink and mixed vocabulary design

• To: XML Developer List <xml-dev@l...>
• Subject: Re: XLink and mixed vocabulary design
• From: "Simon St.Laurent" <simonstl@s...>
• Date: Fri, 23 Jan 2004 11:05:08 -0500
• In-reply-to: <4011433E.2040209@e...>

robin.berjon@e... (Robin Berjon) writes:
>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.

This feels like an argument from laziness, and I have a hard time
respecting it.  I think analyzing documents should mean learning the
vocabularies they use and how they use them.

>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.

I don't have a strong opinion.  I think I'd prefer the former as I
sometimes want to have unlinked material between two places that link to
the same thing, but it hardly matters.  I'd certainly like to have the
option of the former, and not be stuck with the latter, which XLink
does.

>And even then, that could be made generic. There's no need for it to be 
>vocabulary specific.

This is really basic linking; I don't think you appreciate what a rich
set of possibilities is involved here.

>> Bad sex is not pretty good, IMHO.
>
>Still beats XHTML 2 linking though :p

I think we've had different life experiences.

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