On Thu, Nov 15, 2001 at 06:54:46AM -0500, Daniel Veillard wrote: > On Thu, Nov 15, 2001 at 12:28:29PM +0100, Yann Dirson wrote: > > A possibility would be to define this AF so that we're on a firm > > formal ground, and continue using DocBook as it is now. SGML users > > would be able to get the Xlink architectural instance if needed (hm, > > does it make sense ?). Then later the AF support for XML can be > > written. > > The reason why XLink *requires* the href attribute to be prefixed > is because processing XLink correctly *requires* correct namespace > processing. Using AF to try to turn around the absence of namespace > support in the SGML toolchain is not a way to proceed I can endorse.
This is not the idea (although you're right in that I'm generally concerned with being sure SGML tools can still work ;). We could define attributes named "xlink:href" in SGML, it would cause no problem. My issues with this are that: 1. using it requires an incompatible change, even for those authors not using the full power of XLink. 2. "xlink:href" is, well, much less sexy than "linkend", and the name does not really reflect the semantics attached to the attribute as much as "linkend" does - and my guess is that "href" originates from HTML, and that W3C decided not break compatibility in XHTML, right ? Although it's cool for XHTML authors, I'm sure it would be as cool for DocBook authors not to have compatibility broken either. > You can try it though, but don't expect the XML tools to follow because > the problem is that XML uses namespaces to associate semantic to syntax, > and trying to reduce this to just a syntax issue is not a proper > analysis of the problem. This is a whole other issue. Is there something in this that using an AF wouldn't solve ? -- Yann Dirson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> http://www.alcove.com/ Free-Software Engineer Ing�nieur Logiciel-Libre Free-Software time manager Responsable du temps Informatique-Libre Debian GNU/Linux developper <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> ---------------------------------------------------------------- To subscribe or unsubscribe from this elist use the subscription manager: <http://lists.oasis-open.org/ob/adm.pl>
