Copyright © 2000 W3C® (MIT, INRIA, Keio), All Rights Reserved. W3C liability, trademark, document use and software licensing rules apply.
This document details the responses (or lack of response) made to issues in
XLink raised by the XML Linking Working Group, other W3C Working Groups, and
the public (via the www-xml-linking-comments
mailing list).
This document from the W3C's XML Linking Working Group describes the disposition of comment as of 3 July 2000 on XLink Last Call (Feb 21 2000 to March 20 2000). It may be updated, replaced or rendered obsolete by other W3C documents at any time.
For background on this work, please see the XML Activity Statement.
1. Introduction
2. Comments Received
2.1. Technical Errors and Clarifications
2.1.1. References to [IETF RFC 1738] and [IETF RFC
1808]
2.1.2. Terminology points
2.1.3. Multiple roles
2.1.4. DNS for examples
2.1.5. Organization: conformance and terminology
2.1.6. Definition of "URI reference"
2.1.7. Examples are confusing
2.1.8. Violation of 'mandatory conditions'
behaviour
2.1.9. Limit of the 'application'
definition
2.1.10. Definition of 'element'
2.1.11. Add a robot PI
2.2. Requests From Other Working Groups and Member
Companies
2.2.1. I18N: Definition of "URI reference"
2.2.2. I18N: Refining how multiple title are expect to
be used
2.2.3. Use of CName
2.2.4. XML Schemas definition for XLink
2.2.5. Not meeting requirement of handling
existing markup
2.2.6. Remove external linkset
2.2.7. External linkset can be declared anywhere
in the document
2.2.8. DOM: Accessing embedded documents
2.2.9. HTML: Remove the title constructs
2.3. Spelling Errors and Other Typos
2.3.1. Grammar problem
2.3.2. Editorial comments
2.3.3. Spelling, typo
2.3.4. Congratulation
2.3.5. HTML WG Editorial comments
2.3.6. Minor editorial problems
This document describes the disposition of comments in relation to the XLink Last Call Working Draft. The comments have been categorized: technical errors in the current specification, requests from other Working Groups and Member Companies, and editorial comments (consisting of spelling and grammatical errors). Each issue is described by the name and contact information of the commentator, a description of the issue, and either the resolution or the reason that the issue was not resolved.
Source: Larry Masinter , http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-xml-linking-comments/2000JanMar/0052.html and Martin Dürst, http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-xml-linking-comments/2000JanMar/0080.html
The WD references all of ([IETF RFC 2396], [IETF RFC 1738] and [IETF RFC 1808]), RFC 2396 was meant to replace and obsolete RFC 1738 and 1808, and actually wound up redefining some terms.
Resolution: Accepted, the new version only references 2396 (in the Appendix A on normative references)
Source: DuCharme, Robert , http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-xml-linking-comments/2000JanMar/0058.html
Resolution: Accepted, though the comment was targetted at an older version. New version of the spec implement the changes, which were accepted
Source: Philippe Le Hegaret , http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-xml-linking-comments/2000JanMar/0070.html
Has having multiples roles on the role attribute (and from/to attributes) been considered by the linking WG ?
Resolution: Dropped, we considered the issue but decided not to add this in the 1.0 version of XLink, Philippe agreed.
Sources: Dan Connolly , http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-xml-linking-comments/2000AprJun/0009.html,
Susan Lesch , http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-xml-linking-comments/2000JanMar/0063.html,
I18N WG http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-xml-linking-comments/2000JanMar/0079.html
Examples in the spec should use the reserved example.org, not existing domain
Resolution: Accepted, only example.com, example.org and example.net are used for domain names in the examples.
Source: Dan Connolly , http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-xml-linking-comments/2000JanMar/0068.html
Dan suggested a number of editorial changes:
Resolution: Accepted, see Eve Maler answer, the editors have changed the specification accordingly.
Source: Martin J. Dürst, http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-xml-linking-comments/2000JanMar/0080.html
The definition of "URI reference" should point normatively to RFC 2396, and also the update of RFC2396 for IPV6, the hyphen should be dropped.
Resolution (members only): Accepted, the editors changed the specification accordingly.
Source: Martin J. Dürst, http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-xml-linking-comments/2000JanMar/0080.html
HTML WG , http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-xml-linking-comments/2000AprJun/0006.html
In 2.3, Attribute defaulting is introduced. However, because the DTD fragments with the defaults appear only some pages later, the rest of section 2, and the first part of section 3, is rather difficult to read or understand. Reorganizing the spec on a large scale would solve that problem. In 2.3, at least one example with all the relevant DTD fragments should be given.
Resolution
(members only): Accepted, there is now a complete example
in 5.1, and the examples have been reorganized in order to clarify them. The
problem of multiple course
children has been fixed.
Source: Henry S. Thompson, http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-xml-linking-comments/2000JanMar/0067.html
Although 'must' etc. are used as per IETF whatever, no discussion of error behaviour is provided, i.e. in section 4.3 point 2, nothing is said as to what "observing the mandatory conditions" means
Resolution (members only): Rejected, Henry is asking what applications should do when they don't "observe the mandatory conditions". The specification states what an application must do to be considered conforming, so there is no prescribed behavior when an application does not conform. If he asks what it means to not meet a "must" in XLink specification, this means the link won't work.
Source: Henry S. Thompson, http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-xml-linking-comments/2000JanMar/0067.html
The definition of 'application' in the (presumably normative) terminology section (1.3) implies that a conformant processor of _any_ document with linked-from resources must recognise that fact. This is clearly to strong a requirement in the case where the document in question contains no linkset information.
Resolution (members only): Accepted, the definition in section 3.3 has been changed to avoid that problem
Source: Henry S. Thompson, http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-xml-linking-comments/2000JanMar/0067.html
I saw nowhere which made clear whether the term 'element' throughout, and particularly in section 4.2, refers to an Element Information Item as defined in the Infoset PWD, or to a character sequence in an otherwise non-well-formed non-XML document.
Resolution (members only): Accepted, the definition in section 3.3 has been changed to make reference to XML Information Set, and the fact that the XML document is well formed.
Source: Walter Underwood, http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-xml-linking-comments/2000JanMar/0087.html
Robots are an important class of link-aware applications. Document authors need to be able to give hints to robots about whether the links in a document should be followed.
Resolution (members only): Rejected, This a separate mechanism. This should however be sent to W3C as a Note and companies from WG members are ready to support this submission to W3C. The author was notified but did not retract.
Source: Martin J. Dürst, http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-xml-linking-comments/2000JanMar/0079.html
The definition of "URI reference" should be changed to make sure that the provisions of http://www.w3.org/TR/charmod/#URIs are taken into account.
Resolution (members only): Accepted, Since the character model is still a working draft, it may be appropriate to copy the relevant text into XLink to satisfy the request for normativeness, as suggested in http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Member/w3c-xml-linking-ig/2000Mar/0025.html (members only).
Source: Martin J. Dürst, http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-xml-linking-comments/2000JanMar/0079.html
'multiple titles are necessary for internationalization purposes': This sounds good, but it should be clearly defined how these are supposed to be selected (e.g. say something like: If multiple title elements are present, and they have different values of the xml:lang attribute, then for display,... the language variant that is most suited for the user should be choosen).
It also should be made clear that 'for cases where human-readable label information needs further element markup', these cases occur much more often e.g. in bidirectional contexts or in East Asia.
Resolution (members only): Accepted, the specification has been updated accordingly in section 5.1.4
Sources: Martin J. Dürst, http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-xml-linking-comments/2000JanMar/0080.html,
Sun Microsystems http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-xml-linking-comments/2000JanMar/0041.html,
the DOM WG http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-xml-linking-comments/2000JanMar/0084.html,
Henry S. Thompson http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-xml-linking-comments/2000JanMar/0067.html
the HTML WG http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Member/w3c-xml-linking-wg/2000Jun/0034.html
We got complaints about the use of QName for the role
,
show
and actuate
attributes values.
Resolution
(members only): Accepted, the definition of these
attributes have been changed. The original role attribute has been split into
two attributes, role
and arcrole
containing URI
references. The show
and actuate
attributes must
pertain to a reserved set of predefined values. The new version of the
specification reflect those changes
Source: The XML Schemas WG , http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-xml-linking-comments/2000JanMar/0081.html
Henry S. Thompson, http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-xml-linking-comments/2000JanMar/0067.html
We were requested to provide an XML Schemas definition for XLink constructs.
Resolution (members only): Rejected for the moment. XML Schemas is not likely to go to REC before XLink, so providing a normative XLink schemas definition would be a problem. However some members of the Working Group have provided a first schemas for XLink constructs (members only). We expect this to be developed more during Candidate Recommendation phase, hoping that support of attribute remapping will be possible.
Source: The HTML WG http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-xml-linking-comments/2000JanMar/0073.html,
the SYMM WG http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-xml-linking-comments/2000JanMar/0082.html
Lloyd Rutledge clarification http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-xml-linking-comments/2000JanMar/0045.html
The HTML WG philosophical report concludes with:
Xlink does not meet the basic requirements it set itself, nor of its 'customers', and as such is insufficient for the needs of the future web. Any linking proposal that requires documents to be changed in order to use linking is not suitable.
The SYMM WG argues:
The original requirements of XLink, as described in the requirements document, include representing the HTML hyperlinks conveyed by the HREF and SRC attributes, and enabling any XML document to have its hyperlink semantics recognized, regardless of its syntax. The XML Linking working group has since made the decision not to meet these requirements.
Resolution
(members only): Rejected, the XML Linking Working Group
decided not to add support for attributes not attached to the XLink namespace.
The XML Linking Group hope that XML Schemas will allow attribute remapping, or
at least provide a way to attach href
attributes without
namespace to the XLink namespace (c.f. Henry
S. Thomson's mail). The Working Group provided a more elaborate answer
(member only) to the proposal submitted by the HTML Working
Group.
Source: Arbortext , http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-xml-linking-comments/2000JanMar/0044.html
Academia Sinica , http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-xml-linking-comments/2000JanMar/0047.html
Given that out-of-band methods are ideal, some of us feel that providing an in-band method is inappropriate, and we would prefer not to have any syntactic specification for external linksets in the XLink specification.
Paul Grosso suggested to use a packaging mechanism to associate linkbases. Rick JELLIFFE suggested that in the absence of a packaging mechanism the working group add a paragraph explaining that the role attribute can already be used for a kind of packaging mechanism.
Resolution (members only): Rejected the Working Group decided to keep the external link set construct, useful to advertize link bases in decentalized annotation systems. The syntax used to construct it has been modified to match more closely other types of links. Arbortext message represent a minority opinion from a working group member.
Source: DOM WG, http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-xml-linking-comments/2000JanMar/0084.html
Henry S. Thompson, http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-xml-linking-comments/2000JanMar/0067.html
Lauren wrote
3.1.5 - it appears the entire (potentially large) document must be searched to resolve XLinks (although DTD declarations could help). This could be expensive in a large document, no matter how efficiently implemented. We suggest some guidance to users for large documents, such as encouragement to declare XLink as early in the document as possible. This applies to both external linksets and out-of-line links.
Henry wrote
In 3.1.5, I'm not sure that requiring sensitivity to role=xlink:external-linkset _anywhere_ in a document is coherent -- at the very least it seriously disadvantages streaming processors.
Resolution (members only): Accepted, but external linksets are normal XLinks. XLink conforming applications must handle extended links anywhere in the document, including the case of external linksets. DOM suggestion is really based on a particular type of XLink implementation and not due to a normative behaviour of XLink. However we added the following sentence to 5.1.5 Locating Linkbases: " To ease XLink processing, document creators may wish to define linkbase arcs near the beginning of a document."
Source: DOM WG, http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-xml-linking-comments/2000JanMar/0084.html
Lauren wrote
there is no way in the DOM currently to go from the document to the embedded document. This would be left to the XLink implementation.
Resolution (members only): Acknoledged, Currently there is no XLink specific DOM API. Until such an API get defined there won't be a way to get access to the embedded object instance.
Source: HTML WG, http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Member/w3c-xml-linking-wg/2000Jun/0034.html
The description of the title attribute here is very vague, and we wonder if it should be in Xlink at all. Since such an attribute is turning up in several W3C recommendations, it seems better to be applied to XML as a whole rather than each application adding a new, slightly different, version.
Resolution (members only): Rejected, the title attribute and elements have been refined in close coordination with the I18N working group and meet their approval. The title constructs are optional to use. If another title construct gets standardized, it will be easy to use it in conjunction with XLink. In the meantime, XLink needs to provide its own title constructs.
Source: Elliotte Rusty Harold, http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-xml-linking-comments/2000JanMar/0049.html
In section 3.4 the wording of a sentence is unclear due to grammar problem.
Resolution: Accepted, this section has been rewritten in 5.4 Locator Attribute.
Source: Susan Lesch , http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-xml-linking-comments/2000JanMar/0063.html
Resolution: Accepted, all change have been implemented
Source: Martin J. Dürst, http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-xml-linking-comments/2000JanMar/0080.html
Resolution (members only): Accepted, however the space problem could not be found after some specification reorganization.
Source: Dave Hollander, http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-xml-linking-comments/2000JanMar/0076.html
Dave sent very positive message but noted 2 details
Resolution: Accepted, both have been cleaned up in the specification.
Source: HTML WG, http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-xml-linking-comments/2000AprJun/0006.html
Resolution: Accepted, except for the change of "local resource" since the definitions in 2.3 define precisely the meaning of "local resource" and "remote resource". The Abstract has been changed to "...structures that describes links similar to the simple unidirectional hyperlinks...".
Source: Henry S. Thompson, http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-xml-linking-comments/2000JanMar/0067.html
Resolution (members only): Accepted, all points have been corrected. The handling of xlink:href="" is defined in RFC2396, some prose was added to section 5.4 to clarify its meaning.