Eve Maler of Arbortext is co-editor of the XML Linking Language (XLL) specification, which is currently a working draft at the W3C. In this talk, Maler explains the goals of XLL and how it enables new applications and solves old problems. This audio presentation is an edited excerpt of her talk at Seybold Seminars/NY.

As the name would suggest, this site covers a topic that is important to all developers, the feedback of developing an application.

This section presents resources, tutorials and overviews about XLink and XPointer.

The XPointer and XLink specifications, currently under development, introduce a standard linking model for XML. In consideration of space, and the fact that the XLink draft is still developing, what follows is survey of the features of XLink, rather than a detailed description of the specification.

The W3C XML Linking Working Group. The XML Linking Working Group is designing hypertext links for XML. Engineers defining the way that links are to be written in XML have made a distinction for links between objects - 'external' links, and 'internal' links to locations within XML documents, and both types will receive detailed treatment by this group. The objective of the XML Linking Working Group is to design advanced, scalable, and maintainable hyperlinking and addressing functionality for XML.

Topic Maps fit naturally the XML paradigm. Because they apply on SGML, they apply of course on a simplified form of SGML. Constraints on the representation of SGML documents brought by XML result in making Topic Map software easier to build. In that regard, Topic Maps are taking benefit of the advantages brought by XML over full SGML.

To provide a useful document management system having a facility to process link representations, we have already developed a document browser called HyBrick and intended to append the facility to process the link representat ions to this HyBrick. We selected XLL as the link representation.

XLink is an XML specification for describing links between resources in XML. Our introduction shows you how to get to grips with using XLinks in your own documents."

Now that we have a basic idea of how XLink looks, it's time to dive into the details. This section presents all the constructs and rules contained in the XLink specification