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On Sat, Apr 02, 2005 at 06:06:07PM +0100, Michael Kay wrote:
[...]
> 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.
There are three main approaches to links in the markup world --
[1] a fixed vocabulary (html:a, xlink:link)
[2] link discovery (e.g. via a style sheet)
[3] dynamic/programmed links (e.g. "every word or phrase in this list
is a link to the corresponding encyclopedia entry")
With each of these, links can be stored inline or externally.
XLink handles only case [1], although this approach has meant that
the WG failed to meet their requirement to support HTML markup
(however broken one might consider that markup to be, with
user-visible text in attributes all over the place!).
> 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.
Agreed, although I think that's not the only reason.
People don't generally see enough benefit in using someone else's
markup to represent relationships.
There _are_ users of XLink, by the way, both within W3C (e.g.
SVG) and outside (GML I believe to be an example).
Liam
--
Liam Quin, W3C XML Activity Lead, http://www.w3.org/People/Quin/
http://www.holoweb.net/~liam/
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