understanding a standard

I found that the author did a really good job in describing these technologies.

This book is written by two academic and it shows in so far as it is on the one hand a little more theoretical and abstract than most other computer book I read and on the other hand well informed by a large context.

The book starts by describing the different hypertext system that exist and existed alongside with the world wide web. In doing so they explain clearly how HTML linking model came into being and the deficiencies of this model.

The remainder of a book is in part a preview into the future of XML linking (where these technologies are going) as well as an explanation of Xpath, Xlink and Xpointer syntax.

As you probably know, Xlink is still a W3C working draft at this time. Xpointer is a W3C recommendation but neither xpointer, nor xlink have been largely implemented in the industry. This raise the question as to why would you read this book?

Personally I wanted to know where the linking model was going and I also wanted to understand the W3C working draft better. To a lesser extend, I was considering implementing these technologies.

My only objection to the book is its subtitle "A practical guide...". Practical is a relative term. This book gives very valuable pointers (no pun intended) for developpers wishing to implement these technologies but it does not give very practical down to earth examples. In some other web ressources, I found for instance some XSLT code to tranform Xlink into scripting languages that simulate the xlink functionality and to tell the truth I was expecting to find this kind of material here.

Other Reviews

• understanding a standard
• Hyperlinks and the Semantic Web