[whatwg] Absent rev?

[Ian Hickson]

On Tue, 18 Nov 2008, Martin McEvoy wrote:
> 
> Just one small question
> 
> Why Has HTML5 dropped the rev=""[1] attribute?
> 
> [1] http://www.w3.org/TR/html5-diff/#absent-attributes

We did some studies and found that the attribute was almost never used, 
and most of the time, when it was used, it was a typo where someone meant 
to write rel="" but wrote rev="". To be precise, the most commonly used 
value was rev="made", which is equivalent to rel="author" and thus was not 
a convincing use case. The second most common value was rev="stylesheet", 
which is meaningless and obviously meant to be rel="stylesheet". We 
therefore determined that authors would benefit more from the validator 
complaining about this attribute instead of supporting it.

Anything that could be done with rev="" can be done with rel="" with an 
opposite keyword, so this omission should be easy to handle.

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