[whatwg] HTML 5: Wording of "license" link type is too narrow

Dave Hodder dmh at dmh.org.uk
Sat Feb 2 07:14:06 PST 2008


Hello,

The scope of the "license" link type in section 4.12.3 seems too narrow
to me.  It's presently described like this:

     Indicates that the current document is covered by the copyright
     license described by the referenced document.

I think the word "copyright" should be removed, allowing other types of
intellectual property licence to be specified as well.  As a use case,
take for example a piece of documentation that is Apache-licensed:

     <p>This piece of useful documentation may be used under the
     terms of the <a rel="license"
     ref="http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0">Apache License,
     Version 2.0</a>.  Please note that Example™ is a trademark
     of Example.com Enterprises.</p>

The license link not only refers to copyright law, but also trademark
law and patent law.

On a related note, should the "copyright" keyword really be a synonym
for "license"?  They seem to have distinct purposes to me:

     <meta name=copyright
             content="Copyright 2009-2010 Example.com Enterprises">
     <link rel=license
         href="http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0"
         type="text/html">

Thank you,

Dave



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