XLink - where are we? [tiny amount of frustration]

[W. Eliot Kimber]

At 09:49 AM 11/12/98 -0000, Michael Kay wrote:

>To put things another way, if I'm going to have to
>pre-process my corpus by splitting it into lots of linked
>page-sized chunks to make it browsable, I might as well
>render those chunks in HTML while I'm about it.
>
>Ralph - it would be nice to see what Hytime can achieve with
>the New Testament example.

>From a HyTime standpoint, it's purely a matter of presentation style and
browser implementation.

For example, the HyBrowse HyTime browser from TechnoTeacher was implemented
so that whatever you link to is always presented in isolation whenever you
traverse to it. So if you link to a particular chapter, that's all you'll
see when you follow the link.

But this behavior is not required (or even suggested) by the HyTime
standard--it's a decision the implementors of HyBrowse made, for whatever
reason.  They could just as easily have made the opposite decision, or,
like DynaText, given you a way to define the rendering scope in the style
sheet.

The communication between client and server in a generalized hypermedia
environment cannot be standardized to the degree that a given link or form
of address defines or implies a particular communication sequence.  The
most you can do is provide a way for clients to communicate requirements to
servers and provide a common *abstraction* for the data being communicated
so that the appropriate amount of data can be transmitted, regardless of
whether or not it happens to be a single XML document.  Groves are one such
abstraction.  The "fragment interchange" group is trying to solve the same
problem by enabling the transimission of syntactic data chunks that are not
complete documents. While this is a useful practical shortcut, it cannot
replace the transmission of document abstractions in the general case (this
is because there are some processes that require knowledge of or access to
the entire document in order to complete rendition, although it's unlikely
these types of processes will be used for Web-based applications very often).

So, HyTime can't offer any solution to the problem *by itself*, although it
provides a pretty solid framework in which a solution could be defined. But
the solution has to come from client and server providers because it is
ultimately a problem of client-to-server communication, not hyperlink and
address representation in documents (which is all HyTime and Xlink talk
about).

Cheers,

E.
--
<Address HyTime=bibloc>
W. Eliot Kimber, Senior Consulting SGML Engineer
ISOGEN International Corp.
2200 N. Lamar St., Suite 230, Dallas, TX 75202.  214.953.0004
www.isogen.com
</Address>

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