Re: Link Terminology

Daniel W. Connolly (connolly@beach.w3.org)
Tue, 1 Aug 95 11:23:14 EDT

In message <v02110101ac43ea30e233@[192.188.119.193]>, Murray Altheim writes:
>I suppose this type of thing could be the start of a religious war, but I'm
>a little confused as to the new "head" and "tail" terminology in describing
>link relations. It seems backward to me (although many things do), and I
>was wondering if there were any others out there who felt "link" and
>"target" described the relationship less ambiguously. Or at least what the
>rationale was in making the change.
>
>>From the June 16th 2.0 draft:
>
>"In addition to general purpose elements such as paragraphs and lists, HTML
>documents can express hyperlinks. A hyperlink is a relationship between two
>anchors, called the head and the tail of the hyperlink[DEXTER]. An anchor
>is a resource such as an HTML document, or some fragment of, i.e. view on
>or portion of a resource. Typically, the user activates a link by
>indicating the tail of the link; the head of the link is presented as a
>result." [1]

Note the reference to the Dexter model. There is a large body
of literature on hypertext that uses the terminology this way.

For online references, see:

http://www.acl.lanl.gov/HTML_WG/html-wg-95q2.messages/1151.html
Dexterm Model [was: HTML 2.0 LAST CALL: Hyperlinking, Forms, Elements (fwd) ]
Daniel W. Connolly (connolly@beach.w3.org)
Fri, 2 Jun 95 10:51:19 EDT

Dan