[sc34wg3] XLink in XTM

[Lars Marius Garshol]

I've spent some time on the new XTM syntax specification this evening,
and realized that there are quite a few XLink-related issues that we
have never thought through in any depth.

I've added these issues to the current working copy[1], but I think it
may be good to have a discussion about this via email before London,
hence this posting.


The first issue is xtm-xlink-type:

  Should all element types which have xlink:href attributes also have
  xlink:type attributes? If so, which type?

The XLink Recommendation requires conforming elements to have this
attribute, so it appears that we are not conformant unless we add them
to the syntax.  It seems to me that 'simple' is the right choice for
xlink:type if we do add this.


The second is xtm-xlink-actuate:

  Should all or some element types which have xlink:href attributes
  also be given an xlink:actuate attribute? If so, what should the
  legal range of values be?

I added this because this feature is part of XLink and it seemed that
it could be used by XTM authors to specify whether or not they want
XTM implementations to actually traverse the link and load whatever is
at the other end. How useful that is is an open question, but XLink
does at least give us the possibility.


The issue xtm-fixed-attributes also bears thinking about in this
context:

  Attributes declared as #FIXED in the DTD can not be guaranteed to
  always be present in the XML document as parsed, either because
  there is no DOCTYPE declaration, or because the parser does not read
  the DTD. This affects both namespace and XLink parsing, which again
  affects procedure used to recognize element types.


Opinions? Comments?

[1] <URL: http://www.isotopicmaps.org/sam/sam-xtm/ >

-- 
Lars Marius Garshol, Ontopian         <URL: http://www.ontopia.net >
GSM: +47 98 21 55 50                  <URL: http://www.garshol.priv.no >