[xml-h] where to put links

[Simon St.Laurent]

ndw at nwalsh.com (Norman Walsh) writes:
>The fact that HTML doesn't allow overlapping links is just dumb. When
>I implemented XLink support in DocBook, I wrote a little bit of
>extension code to handle them. I chose the "innermost link wins"
>strategy, but a UI that allowed for multi-ended links could just as
>easily provide a drop-down.

Yep.  Bob DuCharme's done a very nice bit of work on that:
http://www.snee.com/xml/linking/1toMdemo.xml

>| That's pretty cool, but XML's insistence on clean structures will
>| still leave some kinds of in-line linking as annoying at best.
>
>To the extent that you want LMNL-like overlapping, definitely. But
>that's an XML "problem" not a linking problem.

Sure - but it's also a problem that XLink/XPointer went to pretty great
lengths to try and solve.  It may be a problem worth considering, at
least for anyone who's already willing to work with external linkbases
but doesn't have the freedom to use LMNL.

(LMNL is a markup language that is designed explicitly for cases where
markup needs to overlap, like annotation.  For more information, see
http://lmnl.org or http://xmlhack.com/read.php?item=1790 .)

-- 
Simon St.Laurent
Ring around the content, a pocket full of brackets
Errors, errors, all fall down!
http://simonstl.com -- http://monasticxml.org