Bizarre XLinks (was Re: Namespace proposal)

[Simon St.Laurent]

At 09:54 AM 12/19/99 -0800, Tim Bray wrote:
>At 08:50 AM 12/19/99 -0500, Simon St.Laurent wrote:
>>It'll satisfy the bizarre demands of the XLink folk that we use their
>>namespace on attributes any place we create links in our own documents,
>
>What's bizarre? -Tim


The last draft had a nifty if sort of crusty mechanism for specifying
XLinks using any attribute names you wanted (see
http://www.w3.org/TR/1998/WD-xlink-19980303#remapping).  The most recent
draft lost that mechanism and everything requires the use of xlink:href
instead of myown:src.

To me, that's bizarre, excessively demanding, and highly irritating
behavior.  XLink right now is what I call an 'inconsiderate spec', one
which requires everything else built on it to look like it, without the
kind of openness that XML provided in the first place.

I don't know what anyone else thinks of it, but I've given considerable
thought to a short proposal rebuilding the remapping mechanism, starting
with xlink:attributes instead of xml:attributes.  (And yes, I know that
I'll be changing what that prefix maps to, and not just the @#X! prefix.)


Simon St.Laurent
XML: A Primer, 2nd Ed.
Building XML Applications
Inside XML DTDs: Scientific and Technical
Sharing Bandwidth / Cookies
http://www.simonstl.com

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