/ Norman Walsh <ndw@[...].com>  was heard to say:
[...]
| 7. Fix XLink by starting over and ... doing something else.

In conversations today on the XML Linking WG, prompted by Erik Wilde's
proposal for an XLink Data Model[1], I was reminded of another
possible solution. It's one that was mentioned, in passing[2], in the
Linking and Style Note[3] of June 2001.

This other alternative answer is to use infoset augmentation. By
modeling linking semantics in terms of additions to the infoset, we
can make a clear separation between the syntactic constructs used to
identify links and their meaning.

So, for example, an HTML browser can construct appropriate link
information items from HREF, SRC, and LONGDESC attributes in the XHTML
by appealing to its own understanding of the XHTML vocabulary.
Similarly, an XLink-aware application can construct them from XLink
1.0 attributes.

As an added bonus, this method allows an application that understands
links to treat both simple and extended links uniformly. It operates
on the linking data model without regard to how that was constructed,
whether the links expressed came originally from simple links in the
source document or a set of external linkbases.

On the other hand, this is an, uhm, LSI, and is sure to be greeted by
some with the same enthusiasm as the PSVI :-).

                                        Be seeing you,
                                          norm

[1] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-style/2002Aug/0095.html
[2] http://www.w3.org/TR/xml-link-style/#xlink-infoset
[3] http://www.w3.org/TR/xml-link-style/

-- 
Norman.Walsh@[...].COM    | Part of thinking is its cruelty, aside from
XML Standards Architect | its contents. It is the process of detachment
Sun Microsystems, Inc.  | for everything else, the ripping, the
                        | wrenching, the sharpness of cutting.--Elias
                        | Canetti

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