Element to Element Linking

["Ram Kumar" <kumar.sydney@gmail.com>]

XCMTDMW: Element to Element Linking
Eliot Kimber, Dr. Macro Blog

This article is one in series of highly informative discussions on
technologies related to XML Content Management. Kimber writes: What do
we mean by "linking" in the context of XML document processing? The
most general definition is "a semantic object that establishes a set of
one or more relationships among uniquely-addressible XML components".
This definition is reflected by the XLink and HyTime standards, which
provide syntax and semantics for establishing arbitrarily-complex
relationships between arbirarily-addressible things. XLink is limited
to the domain of linking among XML components, HyTime provides generic
facilities for making anything generically addressable and therefore
enables linking anything to anything via a single standard representation
mechanism (groves). A link is a semantic relationship whose meaning is
independent of how the relationship is established. It doesn't matter
how a link is expressed syntactically in your data: XLink, XIinclude,
HyTime, HTML, your own 20-year-old link markup... addressing, on which
semantic linking depends, is entirely syntactic. Addressing is the
plumbing or mechanics that let you physically connect things together:
the pointers. The addressing syntax you use has many practical
implications, including the availability of implementations, the cost
of implementation and processing, the opportunities for interoperation,
and so on, but the specific syntax you use doesn't affect the meaning
of the relationships established by the links that do the addressing.
Clear thinking about linking requires that you be able to make a
complete and clear distinction between the syntax-independent and
syntax-specific parts of linking.

http://drmacros-xml-rants.blogspot.com/2006/07/xcmtdmw-element-to-element-linking.html