[tei-council] url vs xlink:href

[James Cummings]

Sebastian Rahtz wrote:
> John A. Walsh wrote:
> 
>> Hi All,
>>
>> This may have been discussed before I recently joined the council, but 
>> is there a reason why P5 uses "url" instead of "xlink:href" for its 
>> general purpose linking attribute?
>>
> sow09:
> 
> "This has since been rejected once it was
>  realized that in TEI this attribute can point to multiple
>  places (i.e., is of type <ident
> type="datatype">tei.pointers</ident>), unlike the HTML
>            attribute which can only point to one element."

Forgive me if I'm mistaken, but isn't this quote talking about the 
possible (and then rejected) change of name of the 'target' attribute, 
not the url attribute?  For John, 
http://www.tei-c.org/Council/tcm11.html#body.1_div.13 is where the 
council suggested the SO wg think again in respect to renaming @target 
to be @href.  As @target on <ptr> seems in the current P5 draft to be of 
datatype.uriList, and so can contain multiple URIs, this makes sense.

But John's question, I'm assuming, was about the use of @url not @target:

@url as used on say <graphic> is xsd:anyURI, presumably because it needs 
to point to one particular thing.

But interestingly, the SO wg seems to suggest use of @xlink:href
when using SVG (http://www.tei-c.org/Activities/SO/sow04.html), but I 
don't know whether this was followed up or not, or considered outside 
the scope since I'm assuming it is what is used in SVG.  Can someone 
remind me (also as a newcomer) whether it was the decision and rational 
was concerning use of SVG to be used within <figure>/<graphic>? Is this 
the recommend use or only offered as an extension?

@url as used seems to point to only one thing (unlike @target). 
@xlink:href also seems to point to only one thing.

If we are going to have to be processing xlink:href when used with 
SVG...should we use it elsewhere?

Just musing out loud,
-James

-- 
Dr James Cummings, Oxford Text Archive, University of Oxford
James dot Cummings at oucs dot ox dot ac dot uk