[topicmapmail] Controlled Linking and Modular Topic Maps

[Murray Altheim]

A correction in my example syntax.

Murray Altheim wrote:
[...]
>   1. using explicit <association> elements. Since the 'actuate'
>      behaviour is meant to apply to the entire link/association,
>      the presence of one of the four actuate PSIs in the <scope>
>      of an <association> element is meant to indicate linking
>      behaviour. E.g.:

There's an oops in the original. Here's the correction:

    <association>
     <scope>
      <subjectIndicatorRef
          xlink:href="http://www.w3.org/TR/xlink/#actuate-att-onRequest"/>
     </scope>
     <member>                     <!--  internal link  -->
       <topicRef xlink:href="#foo"/>
     </member>
     <member>                     <!--  external link  -->
       <topicRef xlink:href="languages.xtm#en"/>
     </member>
    </association>

This would indicate that any links to external topic maps within
the association, in this case "languages.xtm#en", should only be
traversed "on a post-loading event triggered for the purpose of
traversal", i.e., when the application warrants it, either with
or without direct user intervention.

To answer one of Jan's questions, which of the XTM reference
elements would be used in this context, the answer is that
this proposal would not constrain the reference type since
whatever link made sense in <scope> prior to this proposal
would still make sense following it, i.e., any of the three.

Jan's suggestion on having PSIs available for various parts of
HTML hilights what to me has always been one of the primary
faults of the W3C, i.e., the lack of any overarching architecture
for their designs. This could have been solved by a simple W3C
Rec early on that would have stated that the way to refer to
the elements or attributes of a given namespace would be to
take the XML namespace for the markup language and apply some
syntactical formula to provide URIs for each element and
attribute. For example, for XHTML 1.0, I'd suggest something
akin to:

  <b> :            http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml/#ELT_b

  'class' attribute:  http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml#ATTR_class

  'class' on <b>:  http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml#ELT_b_ATTR_class

...or some such thing. This kind of thing could easily have
been accomplished had the W3C Recommendations all been published
where the above URLs always linked to the element or attribute
description within the Recommendation. The actual ID syntax isn't
important, the lack of it is.

Absent this being available since about 1999 (when the XML
Namespace Rec came out) we've been left with no consistent
approach to this very common problem. DCMI has one way, RDF
another (despite the former being based on the latter), and
we had to create our own for XTM 1.0. Of course, as you point
out, there is simply nothing available to talk about XHTML,
SVG, etc. elements and attributes in a consistent way so we're
forced to invent. Invention can be a very bad thing, despite
opinions to contrary.

Murray

......................................................................
Murray Altheim                    http://kmi.open.ac.uk/people/murray/
Knowledge Media Institute
The Open University, Milton Keynes, Bucks, MK7 6AA, UK               .

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