FancyHyperlinking

HTML linking, XLink and RDF are all about expressing relationships. This is an experiment in exploring new ways of using RDF's graph model (and perhaps XML syntax) within HTML-style hyperlinks.

HTML linking patterns

Often people write HTML links in the following style:

<p>
There is an interesting <a href="http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2003/04/09/quin.html" 
title="The XML.com Interview: Liam Quin">article</a> in XML.com about 
<a title="Liam Quin's home page" href="http://www.holoweb.net/~liam/">Liam Quin</a>.
</p>

This is a very common idiom. Links are used almost 'in passing' when mentioning various entities, eg. people, places, movies. Often the link is to a homepage or mailbox of the named entity; sometimes it is to a page whose main topic is that entity.

What is missing?

Nothing in the above markup tells us that the topic of the first page is the entity that the 2nd page is the homepage of. A fancier hyperlinking solution might allow us to be more explicit, so that we could determine mechanically the things that a human would learn from reading the above HTML paragraph.

See PersonsVersusTheirDescriptions for sample RDF/XML markup on this topic

First draft by DanBri. Need to investigate xlink facilities...