Grauw’s blog

XLink 1.1

April 4th, 2008

I read today that there was a new version of the XLink specification upcoming (XLink is a generic linking system for XML, mainly used in SVG), and I am glad to see that they made the ‘type’ attribute optional. In XLink 1.0, one had to write this to create a link:

<li xlink:type="simple" xlink:href="">

In XLink 1.1, you can simply write:

<li xlink:href="">

I’m glad they fixed this. They should have done this in the first place! Now let’s hope some browsers will pick this up. The XLink 1.1 specification should hit Candidate Recommendation status soon.

Grauw

Comments

by Martijn Wargers at 2008-04-09 20:44

Actually, I know in Mozilla there was some discussion of removing XLink support in Mozilla, completely.
See also https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=332773

Also, see http://www.nabble.com/No-response-to-conformance-question-since-April-p5443347.html

Nothing has happened to XLink support in Mozilla thus far, but that might be because they forgot to remove it, perhaps.

I don’t know, but isn’t Mozilla the only browser that has limited XLink support? I have some doubts that other browsers are going to support it.

by Grauw at 2008-04-14 13:52

Hm, I’d say it is not really possible to remove XLink support, given its wide use in SVG content. But the bug says it clashes with SVG, Hixie could have elaborated a little more on that because it is not obvious to me how that would be. Also, don’t Opera and Safari support this, as they support SVG? Well, maybe they do just in SVG content.

Either way, I have to admit the use of XLink is limited, given that languages can also define their own hyperlinking functionality (though re-using XLink like SVG does seems like a good pattern). It’s just that this required type attribute always seemed unnecessary to me, and I could imagine it would annoy authors who try to use XLink :).