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Subject: Re: DOCBOOK: Re: Linking in DocBook V5.0


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 <Yann.Dirson@fr.alcove.com>                 http://www.alcove.com/
Free-Software Engineer				      Ingénieur Logiciel-Libre
Free-Software time manager    	       Responsable du temps Informatique-Libre
Debian GNU/Linux developper <dirson@debian.org>


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