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

[Matthew Raymond]

Charles Iliya Krempeaux wrote:
> Perhaps I can illustrate what I mean with an example.
> 
> (But first note that people can make up their own values for "rel" and
> "rev".  But anyways, here's the example.)
> 
> Let's say in a page, I have the following HTML code...
> 
> <li class="xoxo shows">
>     <li><a rel="show" href=" http://show.example.com/">Example IPTV
> Show</a></li>
>     <li><a rel="show" href="http://show2.example.com/">Another Example
> IPTV Show</a></li>
> </li>

   (Not the best example, because "show" can be a verb.)

> The semantics here are....  The class-xoxo (on the <li>) says that I'm
> giving a list here.  And the class-shows says this thing is/has
> "shows".  (So basically, I'm listing shows.)

   Wouldn't this be a lot like using |rel| to define a media type?
Granted, it's more the example you're using than your general concept
that's causing the confusion.

> The rel-show inside the "list of shows", says what's at the end of the
> "href" is a "show" for the list of "shows".
> 
> So,... if you go to the URL in the "href", you get a whole HTML page
> with all sort of stuff in there.  But what is the "show"?  The whole
> page?  Just part of it?

   How about the element that has the ID that's in the URL in the |href|
attribute? That would take you directly to the element in question. I
think |xml:id| is pretty much a standard now.

> Well, I then search the page for [class "show"].  (I look for something
> inside the page with a class with the same token/name use in the "rel"
> that linked there.)

   What if the web page you're linking to has the class name
"JoeMunchey" instead of "show"? You're requiring people to examine the
HTML of the target page in order to use this feature. The |rel|
attribute doesn't have this requirement; you need only to know what the
nature of the target page is.

> If I find (just) one, then great, that's probably what I want to
> concentrate on.  (The other parts of the page are probably [irrelevant].) 
> If not, I'll probably have to concentrate on the whole page.
> 
> (This is the idea of opaque semantics that I was talking about before.)
>  
> Does that clear it up?

   It seems like some sort of a link-to-class, rather than linking to a
URL + ID. I don't see the point. How is anyone going to see this on
their browser? Will it open multiple tabs? I'm not thrilled about giving
authors the ability to open multiple tabs or windows in my browser
without my consent. Will it create a drop-down that lists all the
elements that are part of the class? This will not give me any
contextual information from the page that may help me figure out which
element I want to look at. In fact, if I were creating a page about
various shows, most if not all of the information on the page would be
contextual or supporting information for the shows contained within.

   Sorry, but I just don't see the use case.

>> I would think something like "linktype" would be more appropriate.
>> That said, |rel| is pretty much already corrupted to mean that, and if
>> we introduced another attribute for the purpose of link types, it would
>> either go unused for backwards compatibility reasons or it would
>> supplant both |rel| and |rev|.
> 
> I suggested "hrefclass" because we already have things like... "lang"
> and "hreflang".  It just seemed to follow the same style.  (Since this
> seems to be just like the "class" attribute, expect we are applying it
> to what is at the end of the "href"... so "hrefclass".)

   That would be more appropriate for what you've described above. I
just don't see the point of it.