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Re: XLINK support in browsers
- To: Michael Kay <mike@s...>
- Subject: Re: XLINK support in browsers
- From: Razvan MIHAIU <mihaiu@m...>
- Date: Sat, 02 Apr 2005 10:31:37 +0300
- Cc: 'Matthew Terenzio' <matt@j...>, xml-dev@l...
- User-agent: Mozilla Thunderbird 1.0 (Windows/20041206)
Michael Kay wrote:
XLINK is primarily about defining
links between documents in a standard manner and not about defining
relations
Can you explain the difference
between a link and a relation[ship]?
In my understanding, in the XML world a relation[ship] is a link
with meta information, like a parent-child relationship. When you
define a link in XLINK you are not forced to say anything about the
relationship between the linked elements. You state that there is a
link between certain elements but you may choose not to enter into
details - e.g. not to define their relationship. This is in my
understanding the difference between the 2 concepts: I hope that this
isn't a non-sense to you.
My understanding on the 'relationship' in the XML Core
specification is slightly different - but that is the subject of
another discussion.
Honestly I do not understand your complain here: XLINK is a
specification, so, like any standard it needs some fixed attribute or
element name. The same goes for all the specifications. Lets take the
XML Schema specification: you have some standard tags like
"complexType, simpleType, complexContent" a.s.o. You could complain
that XML Schema is useless because it forces you to use a certain set
of tags.
If XLink is in the user
interface space then it's reasonable for it to have its own vocabulary.
But then it needs to be part of the user interface family of specs like
XHTML. Why should it be in a specification all on its own?
If XLink isn't in the user
interface space then I don't know what it's doing: I don't
want standard attributes for defining relationships, I want to define
my own.
I think XLink has never really
decided whether it's in the "information content" space or the "user
interface" space, and that's why no-one is using it.
You are referring to the "xlink:show" attribute which clearly
belongs in the UI space. Partially this is also true for the
"xlink:actuate" attribute. You have to agree that this type of element
has equal use in both "information content" space and "user interface"
space. Are you suggesting that if the attributes "xlink:show" &
"xlink:actuate" would be missing from the specification then the
specification would be more successful ?
If I understand correctly you don't agree with the UI space in the
XLINK specification. What about the rest ? With XLINK you can define a
full graph as links between resources (local & remote) and also
document this process in a standard way. Not to mention the
bidirectional links and the capability to define links to documents
outside of your control.
IMO XLINKS has failed because of 2 reasons:
1. their power is not really needed in most applications;
2. people are less informed about the capabilities of this
specification; XML is already a sea of specifications; people are glad
when they don't need to read about "YYY" because anybody is saying that
"YYY" is not really useful anyway.
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