What is your experience with XLink?

[Zearin]

A brief rant…

I know XLink never really got much popularity. The only significant example of it in the wild that I can think of is DocBook 5, which AFAIK only uses Xlink's basic capabilities (basic HTML-style links).

However, I think XLink's “extended link” capabilities are grossly underrated. I blame the W3C's unfriendly writing style in the spec. I know they use this style to keep the spec accurate and explicit, but I think all the specs could stand to be rewritten with more accessible language. (Ironic, considering the W3C's mission of accessibility!)

A much better example of extended links exists in a slideshow here. Be sure to click “Next” to get all the info; the relevant slides are 39 (linked) to 45. For those familiar with extended links, this covers the idea of “linkbases”, which is the thing that excites me the most.


And now, I ask…

Anybody had experience using extended XLinks? I want to know all about it!

What worked? What didn't? Best practices? Tools supporting it?

[JohnBampton]

XBRL uses xlink extensively