Linking/XLink?

["Matthew A. Richardson" <ma...@umich.edu>]

Hello all. I have a question about linking and xlink that I hope someone 
can answer. :)

In the XML documents I'm displaying on the web there exists a field called 
<description>. This field contains a general description of the study that 
the xml document describes, and sometimes features one or two urls that 
point to other web sites. Currently, these are set up as standard HTML 
links, and when the XML is rendered, they are rendered inoperable by 
Cocoon. I have explored the possibilities of Xlink and looked at the 
examples provided in the samples folder (which have working links), but I 
still cannot seem to make it work. Just to emphasize the point, I'm not 
trying to link entire <description> element, but rather some text within 
the element. Thus I have the following questions:

1) How is the link tagged within the XML document?

2) What, if anything, needs to be added to the XSL document to make this 
work?

3) What, if anything, needs to be added to the DTD to make this work?

Looking at the samples/index.xml document provided with Cocoon 1.8, I noted 
that they make it work within the xml document by using standard HTML 
linking and some coding in the XSL document. And yet I cannot reproduce the 
same success following that model. I have several books that all indicate 
different ways of handling this problem, but none of the solutions seem to 
work. Any assistance you can provide would be greatly appreciated.

Matthew A. Richardson
Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research
Email: matvey@umich.edu

"Everything tires with time, and starts to seek some opposition,
to save it from itself." --Clive Barker, The Hellbound Heart