<image width="152" height="345" xlink:type="simple"
xlink:href="http://www.turing.org.uk/turing/pi1/bus.jpg" />
Here, the author most likely intends the browser to download and
display the image as soon as it finds the link. And rather than
opening a new window for the image or replacing the current document
with the image, the image should be embedded into the current
document.
Just as XML is more flexible than HTML in the documents it describes,
so too is XLink more flexible in the links it describes. An XLink
indicates that there's a connection between two
documents, but it's up to the application reading
the XLink to decide what that connection means. It's
not necessarily a blue, underlined phrase on which the user clicks in
a browser to jump from the first source document to the target. It
may indeed be that, just as an XML document may be a web page, but it
may be something else too.
Page authors can offer suggestions to browsers about how links should
be handled by using the xlink:show and
xlink:actuate attributes. The
xlink:show attribute tells a browser or other
application what to do when the link is activated, for example,
whether to show the linked content in the same window or to open a
new window to display it. The xlink:actuate
attribute tells the browser when to show the content, for example,
whether it should follow the link as soon as it sees it or whether it
should wait for an explicit user request.