XPath, XLink, XPointer, and XML: A Practical Guide to Web Hyperlinking and Transclusion [Paperback]

Erik Wilde (Author), David Lowe (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: July 23, 2002

Although the Web has grown continuously since its introduction in the early 90's, its technical foundations have remained relatively stable. However, the introduction of XML, along with a sequence of related technologies such as XPath, XLink, and XPointer, has heralded a substantial change in the way in which content can be managed. The most significant of these changes is with respect to the hypermedia functionality which is enabled by the new technologies of XLink and XPointer, especially richer linking and navigation models. This book will describe the new hypermedia features of the XLink/XPointer-enabled Web for developers who are interested in how these new concepts can be used for Web publishing. This book will offer its readers an overview of hypertext and hypermedia possibilities as well as the possibilities of the particular hypertext technologies that are currently being developed for the Web.

Editorial Reviews

From the Back Cover

The combination of Extensible Markup Language (XML) and its related interlinking standards bring a range of exciting possibilities to the realm of Internet content management. This practical reference book documents these critical standards, shifting theory into practice for today's developers who are creating tomorrow's useful, efficient, and information-rich applications and Web sites.

Blending advanced reference material with practical guidelines, this authoritative guide presents a historical overview, current developments, and future perspectives in three detailed sections. Part I provides a conceptual framework highlighting current and emerging linking technologies, hypermedia concepts, and the rationale behind the "open" Web of tomorrow. Part II covers the specifics behind the emerging core standards, and then Part III examines how these technologies can be applied and how the concepts can be put to efficient use within the world of Web site management and Web publishing.

Both detailed and authoritative, this book presents the most thorough documentation of XML's linking standards available, and it examines how today's enabling technologies are likely to change the Web of tomorrow.

Topics covered in-depth include:

• Hypermedia concepts and alternatives to the Web
• XML Namespaces, XML Base, XInclude, XML Information Set, XHTML, and XSLT
• XPath, XLink, and XPointer concepts, strengths, and limitations
• Emerging tools, applications, and environments
• Migration strategies, from conventional models to more sophisticated linking techniques
• Future perspectives on the XPath, XLink, and XPointer standards

0201703440B06182002

About the Author

Dr. Erik Wilde is lecturer and senior researcher at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zuerich, Switzerland, where his work focuses on the technical foundations of the World Wide Web and XML. He is the author of Wilde's WWW (Springer-Verlag, 1999).

Dr. David Lowe is an associate professor and the Associate Dean in the Faculty of Engineering at the University of Technology, Sydney, Australia. He has published more than 65 refereed papers, is on numerous Web conference committees, and is the information management theme editor for the Journal of Digital Information. He is coauthor of Hypermedia and the Web: An Engineering Approach (Wiley, 1999).

0201703440AB06182002

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Product Details

• Paperback: 272 pages
• Publisher: Pearson Education; 1st edition (July 23, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0201703440
• ISBN-13: 978-0201703443
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 7.4 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,579,876 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars understanding a standard, September 15, 2003

By A Customer

This review is from: XPath, XLink, XPointer, and XML: A Practical Guide to Web Hyperlinking and Transclusion (Paperback)

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.

9 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Hyperlinks and the Semantic Web, October 4, 2002

By 

W Boudville (Terra, Sol 3) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: XPath, XLink, XPointer, and XML: A Practical Guide to Web Hyperlinking and Transclusion (Paperback)

If you are like most, your introduction to hypertext was when you used a browser for the first time. You saw how intuitive it was that links were visible on a web page, and how easy it was to click on a link and be taken anyplace else on the web. The great acceptance of the web and its browsers was due in no small part to the ease of use, and the ease of writing HTML pages.

Then after a few years, some deficiencies became apparent. HTML does not separate content from presentation. To do so, XML arose, with its user definable tags.

But XML, by itself, does not take the concept of linking beyond a link being a one way connection between a single source and a single destination. Yet the concept of hyperlinks is much broader and older than the web's instantiation, having been worked on in the 1960s by Nelson and Englebart.

This book expounds on how hyperlinks generalise the links in HTML. You can have multiple sources and multiple destinations. The links can be bidirectional. Given a destination, you can find the documents with sources that link to it. Currently, with web pages, you have to use a search engine to see who links to your pages. And no search engine reaches over 50% of the web.

The book describes the concept of a linkbase: a database of links. It can be stored separately from the underlying documents that it references. This lets you annotate a document without changing it! Imagine the possibilities. The document could be on a CDROM, or on someone else's website.

The implementation of these concepts is through XLink, XPath and XPointer. The authors use Backus-Naur Formalism to describe the grammar and they illustrate it with examples. My only quibble is that perhaps they could have written problem sets, for newcomers to cut their teeth on.

If you want to see a possible future direction of the Semantic Web, have a gander at this book.