14.4. Purposes
The purpose of a related
resource indicates what the resource will be used for. Purposes
distinguish between resources with the same natures used for
different things. For example, DocBook has multiple XSLT stylesheets
for transforming DocBook documents into HTML, XHTML, chunked HTML,
and XSL-FO. These are all related resources with the same nature but
different purposes. Unlike natures, purposes are optional. You
don't have to use them if you don't
need to distinguish between resources with the same natures, but you
can if you'd like.
Purpose names are URLs. These URLs are placed in
xlink:arcrole attributes of a
rddl:resource element. The RDDL specification
defines almost 20 different well-known purpose URLs, mostly in the
form http://www.rddl.org/purposes#purpose. In
addition, you are welcome to define your own; but you should use the
standard URLs for the standard purposes so that automated software
can understand your documents and locate the related resources it
needs to locate. These are the well-known purposes:
Furthermore, the purpose of an XSLT transform is often the URI for
the nature of the resource that is produced by the transform. For
instance, the purpose of a stylesheet that converted documents into
strict XHTML would probably be http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.
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