The XML Core WG has come out with a draft of XLink V1.1 that focuses on two main changes: full conversion to IRI language and concepts, and making xlink:type="simple" an application-level default (a bit of sweetening that I cheered on here as an idea whose time had come). So now you would be able to just throw xlink:href on an element to make it an XLink simple link. I see they also added a RELAX NG schema example, which is a good idea.
I hadn’t looked at the XLink spec itself in quite a while, and seeing those simple pentagonal diagrams brought back some memories. I created those with Visio a long time ago. (Nowadays my Visio skills have gone completely to pot, but for various recent slideware projects I’ve ended up getting a lot of facility with drawing in OpenOffice; I’m using V2 Beta and it uses the OpenDocument .od* format, which seems to fix some drawing bugs associated with the V1 .sx* format.)
I used to be dubious about XLink’s move to a purer arc-oriented architecture, partly because it seemed to be going a fair ways down the same path as RDF (although it did make harvesting RDF statements out of linkbases really easy) and partly because it seemed to optimize for model purity at the expense of hyperlink ease-of-use. Then again, simple links did include some syntactic sugar, and now they’ve got even more. It would be funny and fitting if simple links became popular and then started being harvested for their resource description properties.
