[xml-h] How semantic are links?

[Bob DuCharme]

At 1/20/03 05:54 PM, Dave Pawson wrote:

>the author says they are connected... Its the application that makes it 
>hyper? (blue underlined thingy).

Exactly. And another application could turn the same XML into the following 
RTF,

   {\rtf Simon St. Laurent publishes frequently on XML.com ({\ul 
http://www.xml.com}).}

and another could turn it into the markup necessary to display as a link on 
a Bloomberg terminal, and another application could choose some other 
mechanism to indicate this resource relationship.

I think the biggest difference between a link created by an author right in 
a document and another created by someone else as an entry in a linkbase is 
that the former is so much easier to create. Tim BL knew this, and it was a 
key reason for the growth of the web. The "serious" hypertext people of the 
time wanted to see out-of-line links, but the technology wasn't available 
to make them work as well as 1-to-1 hand authored links could.

Of course, that was then, and this is now.


Bob DuCharme          www.snee.com/bob           <bob@
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