Processing link structures and linkbases in the web's open world linking François Bry and Michael Eckert   View Paper (PDF)   Return to Enabling frameworks and foundations part 1: technologies Abstract Hyperlinks are an essential feature of the World Wide Web, highly responsible for its success. XLink improves on HTML's linking capabilities in several ways. In particular, links after XLink can be "out-of-line" (i.e., not defined at a link source) and collected in (possibly several) linkbases, which considerably ease building complex link structures.Regarding its architecture as a distributed and open system, the Web differs significantly from traditional hypermedia systems. Modeling of link structures and processing of linkbases under the Web's "open world linking" require rethinking the traditional approaches. This, unfortunately, has been rather neglected in the design of XLink.Adding a notion of "interface" to XLink, as suggested in this work, can considerably improve modeling of link structures. When a link structure is traversed, the relevant linkbase(s) might become ambiguous. We suggest three linkbase management modes governing the binding of a linkbase to a document to resolve this ambiguity. ©2006 Association for Computing Machinery