Re: [Docutils-users] XLink as a solution for references

[Guenter M. <mi...@us...>]

Dear Schimon,

On 2025-10-06, Schimon Jehudah via Docutils-users wrote:
>> On 2025-09-28, Schimon Jehudah via Docutils-users wrote:

>> > XLink might be helpful for both, Atom and (X)HTML, in order to set
>> > accurate links to references.  

I don't think using XLink will give advantages to (X)HTML, as browser
support is missing. (Except inside SVG, but even this is deprecated.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XLink#Implementations
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/SVG/Reference/Attribute/xlink:href

I don't know about Atom but it is not listed as a specification supporting
XLink https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XLink#Within_other_specifications


The Docutils Doctree documentation may gain a bit, when we could add a
formal description of internal links (the "refid" and "refname"
attributes) as an "xlink:href" with an XPath fragment specifier that for
the "refid" value "my-id" would mean 'the element that contains "my-id"
in the space-separated list of IDs that is the value of its "ids"
attribute.'
https://docutils.sourceforge.io/docs/ref/doctree.html#refid

...

>> Can you provide a **minimal** working example of what you want to
>> achieve?

> Yes. I can.

> I am working on a publication platform of which all produced documents
> are XML (Atom Syndication Format), and these documents are transformed
> to XHTML with XSLT stylesheets.

How do you produce the XML (Atom) documents? 
With a custom Docutils writer or with XSLT from a standard output format?

> As this platform utilizes The Atom Syndication Format, there is element
> "atom:link" which is almost identical to element "link" of HTML.

> The element "atom:link" is utilized to list related resources (i.e.
> references) and attachments (i.e. enclosures).

> I am interested to link to those links in a local fashion (i..e
> utilizing the sign hash/number/pound (#), utilizing XSLT directives.

...

I have only basic understanding of XML and a vague idea of XSLT so I cannot
help with details. 

I suppose it should be possible with XSLT to convert the "ids" attribute,
https://docutils.sourceforge.io/docs/ref/doctree.html#ids,
to an "id" attribute (maybe just discarding eventual "alias IDs" and
keeping just the first ID), e.g. ::

    - <citation ids="elk-70" names="elk:70">
    + <citation id="elk-70">

Then, a "refid" can be replaced by a "refuri" (or "href") attribute with
simple fragment syntax::

    - <reference name="Elk:70" refid="elk-70">Elk:70</reference>
    + <link href="#elk-70">Elk:70</link>


Günter