[whatwg] typing links

[Ian Hickson]

On Tue, 16 Nov 2004, Ben Adida wrote:
> 
> 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.

What scoping problem?


> 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.

Actually URLs are already allowed in HTML5 -- anything that doesn't 
contain spaces can be used.

   http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/#rel

Cheers,
-- 
Ian Hickson               U+1047E                )\._.,--....,'``.    fL
http://ln.hixie.ch/       U+263A                /,   _.. \   _\  ;`._ ,.
Things that are impossible just take longer.   `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'