[whatwg] Absent rev?

[Martin McEvoy]

Hello Ian

Ian Hickson wrote:
> 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. 
!! rel-author doesn't mean the same as rev-made eg:

"I have just finished this new  <a rel="author" 
href="http://coolsite.co.uk/">Cool website</a> check it out""

that would mean <http://coolsite.co.uk/> is the author of the referring 
page which is nonsense. rev="author" is clearly better semantics in the 
above case?
> The second most common value was rev="stylesheet", 
> which is meaningless and obviously meant to be rel="stylesheet".
And that was the basis of  the whatwg decision to drop rev? (I am not 
criticizing just trying to understand it) surely all it needed was to 
define some rev values (the same as rel) and people will start using rev 
correctly?
>  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.
>   

There are some cases where that is just not possible.
> Cheers,
>   
Thanks

-- 
Martin McEvoy

http://weborganics.co.uk/