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List:       xml-dev
Subject:    Re: [xml-dev] Xlink Isn't Dead
From:       Frans Englich <frans.englich () telia ! com>
Date:       2006-09-22 11:56:51
Message-ID: 200609221156.51721.frans.englich () telia ! com
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On Friday 22 September 2006 09:52, Michael Kay wrote:
> >          If a styling language were able to say "this is a
> > link" and "that attribute is the link address" and other such
> > goodness, what else would be needed in core XML?
>
> Look at what we've got:
>
> parent/child relationships: fine so long as the data is hierarchic
>
> ID/IDREF, with strange lexical rules on the form of an identifier, with no
> ability to have more than one domain of identifiers in the same document,
> with no ability to say what kind of thing an IDREF is supposed to identify,
> and which is confined in scope to a single document.
>
> key/keyref in XML Schema, which removes many of the constraints of ID/IDREF
> but which is still, crucially, confined to intra-document relationships
> (and whose specification is incomprehensible to mortals)
>
> URIs, which mean anything you want them to mean: a semantic-free zone, but
> one with ugly syntactic constraints
>
> RDF, which is impractical for most applications and bears very little
> relationship to XML.
>
> What's needed is a mechanism for declaring and maintaining non-hierarchic
> relationships between objects (elements) that allows:
>
> * freedom of choice in the syntactic form of the identifier
>
> * freedom of choice in the naming of identifiers
>
> * independence of document boundaries
>
> * indirection between identifiers of objects and the addresses of the
> documents containing them
>
> * indirection between identifiers of objects and their XML representations
>
> * bi-directional (inverse) relationships
>
> * flexibility in the management of referential integrity
>
> * versioning

Didn't you forget the kitchen sink?

I'll also wait with proposing The Solution, 'bit busy today.


Cheers,

		Frans

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