In consideration of space, and the fact that the XLink draft is still developing, what follows is survey of the features of XLink, rather than a detailed description of the specification. In the parlance of XLink, a link expresses a relationship between resources. The exact nature of the relationship between resources depends on both the application that processes the link and semantic information supplied. XLink gives you control over the semantics of the link. XLink introduces Extended Links.
Extended Links can involve more than two resources.
XPointers provide a sophisticated method of locating resources. In particular, XPointers allow you to locate arbitrary resources in a document, without requiring that the resource be identified with an ID attribute. Since XML does not have a fixed set of elements, the name of the linking element cannot be used to locate links. Other attributes can be used to provide additional information to the XML processor. An attribute renaming facility exists to work around name collisions in existing applications.