XS: out of line links

Subject: XS: out of line links
From: James Clark <jjc@xxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Sat, 24 May 1997 11:11:07 +0700
At 20:33 23/05/97 EDT, lee@xxxxxx wrote:

>In general, the ability to apply styles to selected regions of a document
>seems important to me.  For example, if I add an annotation, perhaps I want
>a little picture of a pencil in the margin.  I'd like to mark link ends
>(whatever they end up being called -- I still like "airports" best) with
>little icons too, perhaps, or underline them or whatever.  In HTML, the
>starting point of a link is always marked explicitly with SGML containment,
>so that applying a blue underline is easy, but in XML this isn't the case,
>and another mechanism will be needed.

I raised this issue in my web-dsssl paper, and I think it's an important
one.  A while ago on this list I listed the possible approaches I could
think of:

>One possibility would be something like
>
>(default (if (xlink-resource? (current-node))
>             (make link
>                   destination: (xlink-address (current-node))
>                   (next-match))
>             (next-match)))
>
>That's not going to work if you have out-of-line links into character data.
>
>Another possibility would be to have flow objects representing out-of-line
>links (maybe as part of the content of some sort of hyperdocument flow
>object).  That would probaby require special inheritance rules (like for
>table-column), so that you can (for example) get resources in a different
>color.  But that's not enough to for example put a resource in a box.
>
>Another possibility would be to do some link processing on the grove before
>the DSSSL processor sees it which turns out-of-line links into in-line links
>(maybe using a special-purpose node-class).

James






 DSSSList info and archive:  http://www.mulberrytech.com/dsssl/dssslist


Current Thread