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Re: Whatever happened to the xpointer() scheme?

• From: Michael Kay <mike@saxonica.com>
• To: xml-dev@lists.xml.org
• Date: Thu, 28 Apr 2011 17:05:22 +0100

On 28/04/2011 16:27, Tim Mills wrote:
> Does anyone know why the XPointer xpointer() scheme [1] never made it 
> to a W3C Recommendation.  It remains a W3C Working Draft from 19 
> December 2002.
>
> Regards,
>     Tim Mills
>
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There's a fair amount of history here:

http://xml.coverpages.org/xll.html

I think there was a wide range of problems, some more technical, some 
more political. In my view the biggest problems were:

(a) the lack of a proper data model to underpin linking to spans of text 
as distinct from particular elements - I think this was simply too ambitious

(b) architectural confusion about whether the facility was in the 
data-representation space or the user-interface space. In my view the 
separation of concerns between information content and user interface 
has never really been achieved in the linking/navigation arena.

In practice, XPointer was not adopted because browsers weren't doing 
navigation off the XML, they were doing it off the HTML generated from 
the XML, and to generate HTML hyperlinks you don't need XPointer.

Michael Kay
Saxonica

• References:
  • Whatever happened to the xpointer() scheme?
    • From: Tim Mills <tim@xqsharp.com>