"It's important to note at this point that XLinks are not expressed as elements, but as element attributes (from the XLink namespace) which can be attached to any XML element; the most important of these is the XLink "type" attribute, which specifies the type of link being defined. The example above uses this attribute to define four types of links: extended links, resources, locators and arcs (more on these later). By allowing any XML element to become an XLink, the XLink specification substantially improves on HTML's current linking mechanism, which only allows the anchor tag to define links. In the example above, the "item", "link" and "arc" XML elements have been converted to XLinks by the addition of specific attributes from the XLink namespace."