[whatwg] Where did the "rev" attribute go?

[Matthew Raymond]

   You make the argument that people might be using |rev| intentionally
for some values and the the statistical method used by Goggle doesn't
make that determination. Let's look at the two most common uses.

   If you look at |rev="made"|, the most common use of |rev|, it's
pretty clear that the use is intentional. However, |rev="made"| is
pretty much equivalent to |rel="author"|, which is nearly as common, so
the impact of eliminating |rev="made"| is minimal. If you look at the
following link, note that |rev="made"| is the only use of |rev|
mentioned, by the way:

http://www.htmlhelp.com/reference/wilbur/head/link.html

   The second most common usage is |rev="stylesheet"|. Since CSS style
sheets don't use HTML, let alone <a> and <link>, we can safely assume
that this is, in fact, either the result of confusion by the author or a
spelling type, and as you pointed out, a typo is unlikely. This really
does suggest a genuine problem with people not understanding the
difference between |rel| and |rev|, since |rel="stylesheet"| is the most
common use of |rel|. I really wish we could see more data on that, though.

   One of the problems with |rev| is that it's supposed to share values
with |rel|, but in reality many of these values are either have narrow
use cases for |rev| or are completely unusable, such as "stylesheet" and
"icon". In my estimation, this will eventually result in a proliferation
of values that favor a specific value. In fact, that's what we've seen,
since most values are |rel|-centric.

Charles Iliya Krempeaux wrote:
> For example, I tend to use rev-author, rev-comment, and rev-tag quite
> [a lot]. These aren't typos; these are intentional. And I do understand
> what each means and am using them properly.

   None of the values you mention are defined in HTML 4.01, and
considering you are the one asking for |rev| to be included in "HTML 5",
I don't think you can consider yourself a typical author.