Extended links offer full XLink functionality, such as inbound and third-party arcs, as well as links that have arbitrary numbers of participating resources. As a result, their structure can be fairly complex, including elements for pointing to remote resources, elements for containing local resources, elements for specifying arc traversal rules, and elements for specifying human-readable resource and arc titles.

XLink defines a way to give an extended link special semantics for finding linkbases; used in this fashion, an extended link helps an XLink application process other links.

Simple links

Simple links offer shorthand syntax for a common kind of link, an outbound link with exactly two participating resources (into which category HTML-style A and IMG links fall). Because simple links offer less functionality than extended links, they have no special internal structure.

While simple links are conceptually a subset of extended links, they are syntactically different. For example, to convert a simple link into an extended link, several structural changes would be needed.

The following sections define the XLink elements and attributes.

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Appendices

5 XLink Elements and Attributes