[whatwg] typing links

[Ben Adida]

The REL attribute has been proposed as a means to extract *simple* 
meaning from the HTML. For example:

====
By viewing this web site, you are agreeing to its <a rel="terms-of-use" 
href="terms-of-use.html">terms of use</a>.
====

UAs could theoretically implement special UI for some of these typed 
links, though certainly it wouldn't be required. Most importantly, an 
automated crawler could glean structured properties from these typed 
links in HTML.

And, of course, in order to handle the scoping problem of these names, 
one should allow fully qualified names in the REL. Thus, the HTML above 
could make use of well-defined properties like those of Dublin Core, 
and look like this:

====
By viewing this web site, you are agreeing to its <a 
rel="http://http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/rights" 
href="terms-of-use.html">terms of use</a>.
====

The only thing that's necessary to enable this right now is to allow 
the REL attribute to be a fully qualified URL. HTML 5 need do nothing 
more, and no requirements need to be made of the UAs. It's an easy way 
to add structure to HTML documents without having to define all the 
possible structural terms.

-Ben

On Nov 16, 2004, at 8:47 PM, Ian Hickson wrote:

> On Sun, 12 Sep 2004, Ben Adida wrote:
>>
>> As long as we're on the topic of typing links, what about explicitly
>> supporting fully-qualified link types? There could be significant
>> innovation in future browser plugins if people can defined
>> fully-qualified link types that have some (gasp) semantic (gasp)
>> meaning.
>
> Could you give some examples of what you are suggesting? I'm not sure I
> follow.
>
> -- 
> Ian Hickson               U+1047E                )\._.,--....,'``.    
> fL
> http://ln.hixie.ch/       U+263A                /,   _.. \   _\  ;`._ 
> ,.
> Things that are impossible just take longer.   
> `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'