All this CSS vs. linking debate about whether links are presentation
or content reminds me of something I wrote several years ago in the
XML Bible. Maybe they're neither, or, less proscriptively, maybe they
don't have to be either. Quoting myself:
This expands the abstraction of style sheets into the linking domain.
A style sheet is completely separate from the document it describes
and yet provides rules that modify how the document is presented to
the reader. A linkbase containing out-of-line links is separated from
the documents it connects, yet it provides the necessary links to the
reader. This has several advantages, including keeping more
presentation-oriented markup separate from the document and allowing
the linking of read-only documents.
XLink specifically enables the possibility of "link sheets", and
allows the application of different links sheets to one document. Of
course, this would be out-of-line markup that required a separate
processing step, but if this is an interesting use-case, then that is
what you need.
--
+-----------------------+------------------------+-------------------+
| Elliotte Rusty Harold | | Writer/Programmer |
+-----------------------+------------------------+-------------------+
| XML in a Nutshell, 2nd Edition (O'Reilly, 2002) |
| http://www.cafeconleche.org/books/xian2/ |
| http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN%3D0596002920/cafeaulaitA/ |
+----------------------------------+---------------------------------+
| Read Cafe au Lait for Java News: http://www.cafeaulait.org/ |
| Read Cafe con Leche for XML News: http://www.cafeconleche.org/ |
+----------------------------------+---------------------------------+
