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Subject: Element to Element Linking
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
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