Re: XLink support in XSL

["Simon St.Laurent" <simonstl@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

At 02:08 PM 12/18/98 -0500, Chris Maden wrote:
>Why should this be any different?  When you've identified that a
>particular point in a document is a link-end (which XSL can't yet do,
>but will), decide based on the roles and built-in XLink hint
>attributes whether, per *your* application conventions, it should be
>automatic (in which case just go and get the content, no linking
>involved for the user) or if it should be an activatable link, or not
>"hot" at all.

A bunch of questions, in groups:

1) Is this really a task for XSL?  Are applications that aren't concerned
with presentation in the formatting/tranformation world going to need to
cope with all of XSL just to manage a few links?  (Will this be a
subsettable operation, so that you don't need all of XSL, or are developers
going to be stuck with the whole damn thing?) How does it relate to
formatting objects?

2) Does XSL have any way to cope with styling across multiple contexts and
documents? Simple example: I load document A, which has a link (A, B, C).
A's style sheet says to create traversal paths A->B, B->A, A->C, C->A.  I
go to B, and its stylesheet interprets the link as B->A, B->C.  I go to C,
and its owners don't want anyone annotating, so they've specified that no
links from outside the document should be accepted.  User X has their own
style sheet that they slap on top of all this with yet a different
interpetation.  Making multidirectional links robust enough for the Web is
going to require some heavy rule-making.  'Persistence' - necessary for
multidirectional linking and hub groups - brings up some very odd issues
that need to be addressed.

3) Is CSS going to provide similar support?  (I realize that's not
completely relevant to this list.)

I think we're a long way from sorting all of this out, but I've been called
a simpleton enough times that I'm getting used to it.

Simon St.Laurent
XML: A Primer / Cookies
Sharing Bandwidth 
Building XML Applications (February)
http://www.simonstl.com


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