MEP: External Info Links

On Tue, 2015-09-29 at 13:25 -0400, Ekaterina Gerasimova wrote:
> On 6 June 2015 at 08:56, Shaun McCance <shaunm at gnome.org> wrote:
> > = MEP-XXXX
> > - External Info Links
> > 
> > This page outlines a way to link to external pages within
> > informational
> > link sets like topic and seealso links, and proposes a way to
> > specify
> > title, desc, and other information for those pages.
> 
> Yes! This would be really useful!

MEP published:

http://projectmallard.org/mep/mep0007

Implementation is already complete in yelp-xsl, as of 3.18. Just needs
the spec changes to 1.1.

> > == Background
> > 
> > Mallard allows semantic information links for a number of things.
> > Most
> > notably, this is the basis for Mallard's topic/guide navigation
> > structure, and it provides reciprocal seealso links. More info link
> > types can be provided by extensions or future Mallard versions.
> > 
> > Informational links, however, are limited to links within the same
> > document using the xref attribute (or, potentially, to other
> > documents
> > within a site or controlled document set using an extended xref
> > syntax).
> > 
> > This page proposes allowing informational links with an href
> > attribute
> > to point to arbitrary external pages. Obviously, external pages
> > cannot
> > be made to automatically reciprocate links, so this feature should
> > be
> > used with care. Furthermore, it may only make sense to support
> > external
> > info links for certain link types. For example, creating a series
> > out of
> > next links requires each page to specify its next page. An external
> > page
> > would necessarily be the final page in a series.
> > 
> > == Proposal
> > 
> > This page proposes allowing informational link elements with an
> > href
> > attribute to be processed in certain semantic link sets. The href
> > attribute is already allowed by the Mallard 1.0 schema, but there
> > is no
> > specified behavior.
> > 
> > Under this proposal, informational link elements with an href
> > attribute
> > would be included in topic, guide, and seealso link sets for the
> > source
> > page or section. They would not be used by next link sets, but they
> > could be used by extensions or by link sets defined in future
> > Mallard
> > versions. Each informational link type should specify whether it
> > can use
> > external links.
> > 
> > This page currently does not propose anything with the action
> > attribute,
> > although that linking attribute is also currently allowed by the
> > Mallard
> > 1.0 schema.
> > 
> > Link sets using informational links rely on information found in
> > the
> > info element of the target node. Because we can't reasonably expect
> > processing tools to try to find such information on external pages,
> > this
> > page proposes allowing informational elements as child elements to
> > the
> > link element to provide that information.
> > 
> > The allowed contents of informational link element would then be
> > mal_info_content. The current allowed contents is any external
> > -namespace
> > content. This is allowed in mal_info_content, so there would be no
> > backwards compatibility issues for validity.
> > 
> > The information supplied with the link element would only be used
> > for
> > external links. It would not override or supplement information for
> > xref
> > links in any way. It may, in fact, be better to split the schema
> > definitions to only allow the informational child elements for
> > external
> > links.
> > 
> > == Examples
> > 
> > Include the Ten Minute Tour in your seealso links.
> > 
> > [example]
> > [code]
> > <info>
> >   <link type="seealso"
> > href="http://projectmallard.org/about/learn/tenminutes">;
> >     <title>Ten Minute Tour</title>
> >     <desc>Create a multiple-page document in only ten
> > minutes.</desc>
> >   </link>
> > </info>
> > 
> > 
> > _______________________________________________
> > mallard-list mailing list
> > mallard-list at projectmallard.org
> > http://projectmallard.org/mailman/listinfo/mallard-list
> >