Almost XLink...

Subject: Almost XLink...
From: Guy_Murphy@xxxxxxxxxx
Date: Mon, 12 Apr 1999 11:02:15 +0100
Hi.

For those interested I have produced a new version of my linkManager as an
IE5 HTC, which to avoid confusion I'm now calling AlmostXLink or just AXL
(I had to wait until I could think of an acronym that sounded cool :).

It now supports both simple and extended links, inline and out-of-line,
within the document or loading as and external resource. It also support
multiple data, style, and target locators, and action specifiers (for
evaluating script on actuation).

At the moment it only supports user actuation, but I should have auto
actuation in tonight. Then I'm freezing the features to document it.

There is a crude pointing into mechanism supported for specified  targets,
and at a later date I want to figure some sort of pointing mechanism for
loaded data. And at some point I want to play with event actuation.
Something like actuate="#myDiv.onmouseout". And in a similar vein binding a
link against multiple anchors, along with link binding against a
collection, so you could have something like
for="document.getElementsByTagName('h2')", to bind a link against all H2
elements.

At the moment along with being able to specify target="#myDiv" one can
specify target="#myDiv.children(2)" basicaly the target is being evaluated,
so although not fully tested, in theory any IE5 DOM reference that can be
evaluated will work.

You can find examples of AXL in action at
http://www.guy-murphy.easynet.co.uk/xlink.htm

Over the next week I'll be roling the new AXL into my main site, which
should then prove a more extended example (at present it uses a slightly
simpler HTC implimentation which supports a subset of the current HTC), and
a half decent way to test it.

As a side note, the main reason for divergence from a more recognisably
XLink syntax is that I want to support hybrid documents along with XML
documents under IE5. HTML returns from the DOM in IE5 are not well formed
XML, so I am unable to load HTML document fragments into an XML parser. If
I could then I could use selectNodes to gather all elements with xl:link
attributes. As I can't I have to create a link tag.

The primary reason for this is that for some unknown reason IE drops the
attribute quotes for the ID attribute and a couple of others, although
attribute quotes are maintained for most including STYLE etc. (for the MS
chap who hangs out here.... is this a deliberate act of self sabotage on
the part of the IE development team?). The weirdest drop of quotes is with
the namespce decalration. IE inserts any relevent XML namespace declaration
with fragments... good... but drops the attribute quotes!... bad designer
::slap:: bad, bad, bad designer ::slap:: ::slap::

Any comments are of course welcome, but please keep in mind that this isn't
an attempt at an XLink implimentation, but firstly play, and secondly a
linking mechanism for my own site that allows easy and flexible application
of XSL stylesheets to documents.

Cheers
     Guy Murphy
     Web Developer
     The Dialog Corporation plc.
     http://www.guy-murphy.easynet.co.uk
     guy_murphy@xxxxxxxxxx cc: guy-murphy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx



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