Uche Ogbuji writes:
>  Thanks for the history.  It's a fun read.  I was hoping that it would
>  shed some light on the technical problems the XHTML folks encountered
>  in trying to use XLink.  IOW, they don't really help explain current
>  arguments to me. And why in particular do you think namespaces are a
>  problem in XLink?  The only point I've heard from the XHTML folks so
>  far wrt XMLNS are that the XLink namespace is extra to type.  Surely
>  this isn't what you mean?

I think the notion is that XLink was originally a toolkit for describing
linking semantics, which used an architectural forms [based|like]
transformation to connect those semantics to other vocabularies.  There
was a vocabulary, but you didn't have to use that vocabulary explicitly
thanks to the remapping.

In later drafts, post-namespaces, XLink became just a vocabulary.  To
use XLink, you must use attributes in the XLink namespace.  While in
some ways this just a shift from the abstract to the concrete, it's a
pretty large imposition on vocabularies that already have linking
semantics (like HTML - not just A but images, forms, objects, etc.).

For yet a different approach to squaring this circle, see:
http://www.w3.org/TR/xlink-naming/

I'm not sure I particularly love any of these mechanisms, but I can
certainly see why the XHTML folks are angry.
-- 
Simon St.Laurent
Ring around the content, a pocket full of brackets
Errors, errors, all fall down!
http://simonstl.com

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