“The dreams of XML hypertext are dead, or at least thoroughly dormant”
Simon St Laurent’s XML.com article on XQuery is an interesting read. But I think the above statement is worth discussing. Is XML hypertext really dead? Or, if its dormant, is it going to remain so?
Firstly what is XML hypertext? I presume from the context of the quote that Simon is referring to client side use of XML on the web. To me this incorporates several use cases including both the use of XML for presentation (XHTML, SVG, etc) and for data publishing (RSS, Atom, XML based web services). There is an obvious need for linking in both of these use cases.
Where I’d agree with St. Laurent is that most of the existing work here is dormant or duplicated. For example while SVG makes use of XLink, its not used in RSS and Atom, and was deemed not flexible enough for use in XHTML due to issues with attribute naming. However the basic model, labelled links with activation indicators (onLoad, onClick, etc) seems to be shared across vocabularies. But still, XLink has been a Recommendation since 2001 and has yet to set the world on fire.
However where I’d disagree with Simon is that XLink or XML hypertext is thoroughly dormant. Much as I hate to make predictions, I think we’re only just gaining any appreciation of the power of producing good hypertext, because we’re only now seeing the large scale publishing of machine-processable, interrelated data that makes linking worthwhile.
I think growing appreciation of the REST architecture is driving a greater understanding of the benefits of highly linked resources. Sure, we all know its good practice to avoid making web pages that are “dead ends”, but not everyone is publishing data to the same guidelines. The principle of “Hypermedia as the engine of application state” is still not widely understood; it’s a piece of REST Zen that benefits from practical implementation.
Hypertext simplifies client-side development as it avoids spreading the requirement that the client must know how to construct URIs: this reduces coupling. It also simplifies client logic as “the navigation options” (i.e. state transfers) can be presented by the server as the result of previous interactions; the client can simply select from amongst the labelled options. For example if the client needs to access some specific data, e.g. a list of my recently published photos, it can select the appropriate link to retrieve (assuming its available).
That link may be to an entirely different service.
In an XTech 2005 paper I tried to argue (I suspect not very clearly) that linking offers the best route to integration of data from multiple web services. Linking as a means to easier mashing.
If the current data publishing trends continue then I suspect there’s going to be a growing understanding of the benefits of hypertext and this inevitably drive some renewed interest in XLink or a related technology.
What I personally like about RDF in this regard is the “closure” it offers: every resource has a URI, every schema has a URI, every Property and Class has a URI so the data, metadata and schemas can be linked together, and this offers some very powerful capabilities.
