* Thomas B. Passin
|
| .... The problem is that most (maybe all) of these applications do
| not want ANY of the other capabilities of even a simple xlink href.
| For example, in XTM you cannot use "role", "arcrole", "actuate",
| etc. attributes.

* Paul Prescod
| 
| I disagree. The "role" of a topicRef could be
| "http://www.topicmaps.org/xtm/1.0/topicRef".
| The "title" would be something human readable about the referenced
| topic.

You could do this (presuming it were allowed in some later XTM
version), but the question is why you would do it. Processing a
topicRef element as specified by XTM gives you something useful,
whereas processing this according to XLink not only does not produce
something useful, but you don't even know *what* it is it produces.

Sure, you can look at XTM documents in an XML browser and see the
topicRefs as links, but you don't *want* to. It'll just be a godawful
mess. 

Also, the "title" for the referenced topic is already present, in the
form of the base names of the referenced topic.

| "arcrole" may not be useful.
| "actuate" is an abomination.

:-)
 
| Using it "in name" is actually just fine. If a link-checking or
| link-maintaining application can recognize XLinks in XTMs then
| something useful has been accomplished.

This is the sort of thing we were thinking originally, but I am not at
all convinced that it makes sense. Too much of the semantics of those
links is XTM-specific (internal topic references, basically), and as
for the rest doing TM-driven link checking is more useful because
failure reports and suchlike will then be able to produce much more
useful reports.

<URL: http://www.ontopia.net/topicmaps/materials/syntax-comments-2000-09.html#GENERAL > 

-- 
Lars Marius Garshol, Ontopian         <URL: http://www.ontopia.net > 
ISO SC34/WG3, OASIS GeoLang TC        <URL: http://www.garshol.priv.no > 


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