To link documents together, and surf from a page to another, is one of the main characteristics of the Web! At the time of XML, the new W3C Xlink standard arrives…
Xlink, a short name for XML Linkink Language, is a new language: it will allow to write hypertext links between documents of the future. This new standard W3C is about to finalize and to market within one or two months, will allow programmers to create and describe totally new links with another design!
Actually, Xlink will allow to generate links much more complex and richer than they are now. It will be possible to create multiple links: one link will lead towards several destinations. It will also be possible to associate metadata to links or program links to create on a page in separate files different from the original file.
All those new possibilities will make possible other un-experimented things. 'As today, we chose a character policy on our PC',Daniel Dardailler explains, responsible for the W3C European site, settled at Inria in Sophia Antipolis, 'tomorrow, we will be able thanks to Xlink to chose from our navigator, the links structure according to our profile: the users do not have all the time the same needs!'
And it is also with the intention of increasing the power of links that in addition with Xlink language, these are also a new kind of pointers which will appear. Xpointer will permit to specify precise destination points inside a page. It will be useless to create anchors in the middle of a document, like today in HTML; thanks to the new structure, clear and regular of an XML document you will for instance ask to your computer 'give me the first paragraph of the section entitled 'summary''and the Web will answer you.
Plus
-an introduction written by Steven J. DeRose, who is one of the engineers who took a part in the conception at W3C:
-a summary by Eve Maler from Sun Microsystems
The XML
Web languages are written according to a standard. HTML was created from SGML language (1980). SGML lasted because it was very complicated, it was reformed in 1998, then XML appeared and the XHTML standard appeared also later (a mix between XML and HTML)