More XPointer activity

I didn’t expect to be posting so much about linking-and-pointing, but hey, when there’s news, might as well share it… I may have to create a Linking category for posts if this keeps up.

I just saw a note from Bryan Thompson on the www-xml-linking-comments list, detailing his Java-based implementation experience with XPointer in the cweb project on SourceForge. This project is defined as “A framework for building, deploying and managing well-described REST-ful Web services, including REST-ful Web Services realizations for RSS, XML Topic Maps, Structured Arguments, and Workflow.”

It appears as though this project has chosen a scope for its XPointer work that’s similar to Oleg Tkachenko’s work I mentioned below. It puts a premium on supporting extensibility of schemes, and also covers the non-W3C-oriented xpath() scheme and others:

Overall, the extensibility of the XPointer Framework has been the most interesting and powerful feature. We have developed non-W3C schemes for xpath(), RDF, and are exploring schemes for RSS/Atom.

Neato! All the moving parts of XPointer (except for the xpointer() scheme itself, which isn’t a W3C Recommendation) are starting to exude that special scent of success. Maybe if Google’s AutoLink feature gets sophisticated enough, it’ll even need xpointer()…