The NAME attribute

The NAME attribute is inherited from HTML2.0 and is used consistently throughout CML. It serves as the target of a hyperlink, whose semantics are being developed by Murray Maloney and others of the HTML-WG as an Internet draft. In HTML 2.0 it is not precisely defined and is not normally associated with a conatining element. In CML DTDs, however, it can be added to containers (e.g. X.LIST) and so may encapsulate arbitrarily large chunks of the document. (Within the X.HTML sections, CML does not enforce semantics, relying on the HTML community to develop them.

The syntax is as in Murray's document. Every NAME should correspond to a unique label within the document.

There is no scheme in HTML for specifying the type of a pointer (reference) to a data item, so CML uses the string to encode the type. The format is:
type:string
and this must be unique within the document. Where the information is already standardised, so much the better, so that database codes or CAS registry numbers could be used.

The postprocessing software can use the type information to determine what to do. For example:
HREF="MOL:aspirin"
could be rendered either as an internal hyperlink to the molecular information or as an inlined image. The choice could be left as options on the postprocessing software. The following addressing scheme is suggested: