Re: XLink and XSL...

Subject: Re: XLink and XSL...
From: "Simon St.Laurent" <simonstl@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Wed, 24 Feb 1999 08:05:28 -0500
At 10:46 AM 2/24/99 +0000, Guy Murphy wrote:
>Is anybody looking at how XLink might be integrated with XSL?
>
>Given that the navigation metaphor is often a major part of a Web site UI,
>and in the future XLink (or XLink-like mark-up) as a resource external from
>an XML document might we the method of choice for a lot of designers, I
>think this might be of great import to XSL.
>
>I haven't looked at XLink in any great detail (intend to try and correct
>that this week-end), but are we going to have to look at a mechanism for
>XSL to combine or take two input trees? Or do we have to wait on XML parser
>support for XLink directly.
>
>If it's an XSL concern then a mechanism can probably be produced that will
>have application beyond XLink. If it's an XML parser concern then we might
>end up with a highly specific solution.
>
>It seems to me that XLink might only be the start of formalising the moving
>of meta-data to resources external to the document, in particular
>site/application-wide meta-data.

There are a bunch of different possibilities here.

1) Using XLink (rather than a PI) to establish the relationship between a
document and its XSL stylesheet.

2) Using XSL to present links (display issues) and preserve link
information across a transformation

3) Using XSL to determine the traversable paths in a link relationship,
which are left undefined in XLink extended links.  (Extended links are just
a set of resources, not something you can traverse like a simple XLink or
an HTML link.)

All of these are important.  #3 is a hassle, since it seems to leave XLink
dependent (in my view) on a style sheet system that many applications will
find to be useless overhead (i.e., those that don't actually display the
links or perform any other transfomations).  Of course, I've been shouted
down on that point a number of times on xlxp-dev.

Is Chris Maden around?  This is his favorite area of discussion.

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


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