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RE: Current status of XLink

• To: "'Eric van der Vlist'" <vdv@d...>, xml-dev@l...
• Subject: RE: Current status of XLink
• From: "DuCharme, Bob (LNG-CHO)" <bob.ducharme@l...>
• Date: Fri, 26 Mar 2004 11:23:19 -0500

>> So why should relationships be different from objects and attributes,
>> and require fixed names and fixed semantics? 

>Because one may consider that a markup that would have some support for
>describing graphs might be more useful than one that only supports
>trees...
 
I don't think that addresses Mike's point: why does markup that describes
graphs require *fixed* names and semantics? If I can use an XML 1.0 ID
attribute, an rdf:ID attribute, an xml:id attribute, or whatever to give a
particular element identity, I can reference it from another element, and I
can call that element and the attribute used to identify the link endpoint
anything I want. The reference is a link, and links between arbitrary nodes
in the tree can then turn that tree into a graph.

On the topic of a core link markup: once you can establish the identity of
elements and can then reference those elements using those identity values,
you've got the core of linking. What other information should a link be able
to carry? I've got my ideas, Micah has his [1], you've got yours... everyone
has their own, and that's the problem: once you start adding other pieces of
information to those two, you've stepped on a slippery slope. Many agree
that XLink would benefit from being stripped down; let's see them agree on
what should be taken out and what should be left in. 

I wrote recently [2] of how happy I was to see that XML from the U.S. House
of Representatives models linking around their own classes of resources
instead of around some external standard that is supposed to support all
kinds of linking. When you want to view the documents in a browser, the
links get converted at runtime to a/@href links for your browser. It's a
very sensible approach, and Mike really summed up very nicely [3] why this
approach is so sensible, even if he was unaware of the U.S. House documents
example.

(On the topics of describing graphs and adding metadata to links, I'm
tempted to drag RDF into this, but I'll leave that alone for now.)

Bob

[1] http://ubinko.info/writing/skunklink/
[2] http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/wlg/4520
[3] http://lists.xml.org/archives/xml-dev/200403/msg00476.html

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