Article:		XLink: Who Cares?
Subject:		missing pieces
Date:		2002-03-18 23:17:14
From:		Erik Wilde
hello. in my opinion, one of the most important reasons for the lack of success of xlink are the missing pieces. in the same way as xml lacked a proper data model before the infoset came along, we also need an xlink infoset. the w3c note on xlink and styling has made a frist attempt, but it has holes. until there is no formal definition of the xlink infoset, it will be hard to reasonably define things such as xlink transformation, linkbase accesses, queries into the linking structure and similar things. i guess we can learn from history here, which has shown that as soon as you want to do non-trivial things with xml (such as xslt or xquery), it is absolutely necessary to have a data model. another thing is that software companies will not really push things like xlink, which basically is about an open web. when you look at microsoft's smart tags, you can see that what they are doing is nothing more than generic linking under the control of microsoft, which is much more in their interest than general xlink support. general xlink support in browsers (given a suitable linkbase access method) would enable generic linking on the web for everyone.

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  2002-03-19 22:00:17 Adrian Edwards