Re: XLink and XSL...

[Guy_Murphy@xxxxxxxxxx]

Hi Simon.

Thanks for presenting the question I should have presented, it's much
apprciated :)

How about all of the possibilities you list, I've always been of the frame
of mind what's the point of cake if you can't eat it.

However, narrowing the issue down, it's the extended links that I find
especially interesting, and which I think XSL has most to offer and gain
from. As you say, in and off themselved extended links are of little use
until something decides to do something with them. For the purposes of
discussion I'll go as far as to say that XSL is the something that should
be doing the something.

The issue remaining, is what is the description that would be given to this
mechanism?

You suggest that this makes XLink dependant on XSL, which I don't think is
so. Just because XSL defines a rlationship with XLink doesn't mean that
XLink can't forge it's own relationship with other mechanisms.

So, would specifying an XLink resource in a stylesheet with an associated
namespace be enough to allow us to work with XLink resources.

If it is enough could we take this a step further an say that while the XML
document specifying the XSL stylesheet is the primary resource of the XSL
stylesheet, should the XSL stylesheet be able to associate other XML
documents with namespaces off it's own back? If this is allowable then it
doesn't matter whether that resource is XLink or another language, it can
now be interogated. Allwoing this mechanism also introduces the potential
for XSL to be not just a tranformative and formatting process, but an
aggregating one, pulling in all resources necessay to produce the resulting
document.

I should point out that personally I will be pulling resources together in
this way, and if a mechanism doesn't emerge that supports it, I'll simply
hack it with script. I wonder if other developers feel this need, or is it
an idiosyncrasy of mine. I *really* like the idea of XLink and intend to
run with it regardless :)

I would be interested to hear other opinion on this as the matter is a new
consideration for me.

Cheers
     Guy.





xsl-list@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx on 02/24/99 04:05:28 PM

To:   xsl-list@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
cc:    (bcc: Guy Murphy/UK/MAID)
Subject:  Re: XLink and XSL...




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

 XSL-List info and archive:  http://www.mulberrytech.com/xsl/xsl-list






 XSL-List info and archive:  http://www.mulberrytech.com/xsl/xsl-list