One argument brought up here yesterday is that the interlinking of publications, especially deep linking to spots within documents, is so brittle as to be useless (e.g., move the resource, the URL changes, voile' the link is broken.) Thus, it is concluded, this particular advantage of XML to enable interpublication and deep linking systems, is not pragmatically an advantage at all. (With XML documents, deep linking can be accomplished using the W3C suite of related technologies of XLink/XPointer/XPath/xml:id/etc. -- in XHTML there is the well-known "id" attribute to enable deep linking using fragment identifiers, which web browsers *now* use.) A recent article by Sam Vaknin shows, however, that there are clever ways to maintain the integrity of links even if target resources are moved around: http://www.webpronews.com/ebusiness/contentandcopywriting/wpn-6-20050712Digi... DOI was brought up as one solution, and DOI is certainly powerful. In addition, the Publication Structure Working Group at OeBF delved into this issue a couple years ago, and although issued no specs, concluded that linking (both interpublication and internal) using a special URI (with embedded XPointer stuff) is possible where the target resource does not have to exist at a particular spot in some network. It does, however, require a unique identifier for each resource. (PG already has a crude identifier system, but because of how it is assigned/structured makes it somewhat more difficult to use for interpublication linking purposes -- a WEMI-based modularized system for identifiers is definitely more powerful and flexible.) The important point is that XML markup provides the needed hooks to enable all kinds of systems to interlink between, and deeplink into, publications. It is not *my* system at all (as the poster alluded to), and makes no difference whether I myself build some sort of linking system or not. To reiterate, XML provides standardized and convenient hooks for linking and deep linking into publications. That's all. This is an advantage, one of several, of using XML for mastering PG's digital texts. That's why mastering the PG texts in XML makes sense: we are preparing the texts not only for benefits today, but for yet unforeseen future uses. Jon Noring