Re: [topicmaps-comment] mergeMap Pointing to More Than OnetopicMapElement

["Thomas B. Passin" <tpassin@comcast.net>]

[Lars Marius Garshol

> * Thomas B. Passin
> |
> | Hmm, then maybe we should not be using xlink?  I think your
> | reasoning is good, but xlink does specifically use xpointer
> | references.
>
> Maybe it was a mistake to use XLink, after all. I think our choices
> are to either not use XLink (but that requires a syntax change!) or
> to restrict our XPointer usage. I don't like it, but I don't see what
> else we can do.
>
In fact, we really do not want full xpointer syntax anyway - what would be
the meaning, say,  of a range of characters between the 5th char of the 3rd
baseNameString element, and the 30th char of 5th following resourceData
element?

It is probably best to restrict xpointers to be bare xpointers only, using
text or a grammatical production.  An alternative would be to add a
non-xlink pointer attribute of our own, keep the xlink href but deprecate
it, slowly switching over to the new one.  But that would make
implementations a little more complex.

Cheers,

Tom P