Simple Links
A simple link defines a one-way connection between two
resources. The source or starting resource
of the connection is the link element itself. The
target or ending resource of the connection is identified by a Uniform Resource
Identifier (URI). The link goes from the starting resource to the
ending resource. The starting resource is always an XML element. The
ending resource may be an XML document, a particular element in an XML
document, a group of elements in an XML document, a span of text in an
XML document, or something that isn’t a part of an XML document, such
as an MPEG movie or a PDF file. The URI may be something other than a
URL, perhaps a book ISBN number like urn:isbn:1565922247
.
A simple XLink is encoded in an XML document as an element of
arbitrary type that has an xlink:type
attribute with the value simple
and an xlink:href
attribute whose value is the URI
of the link target. The xlink
prefix must be mapped to the http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink
namespace URI.
As usual, the prefix can change as long as the URI stays the same. For
example, suppose this novel
element
appears in a list of children’s literature and we want to link it to
the actual text of the novel available from the URL ftp://archive.org/pub/etext/etext93/wizoz10.txt:
<novel> <title>The Wonderful Wizard of Oz</title> <author>L. Frank Baum</author> <year>1900</year> </novel>
We give the novel
element an
xlink:type
attribute with the value
simple
, an xlink:href
attribute that contains the ...
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