[whatwg] Absent rev?

[Smylers]

Martin McEvoy writes:

> > o 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:

In which cases doesn't it?  If A is the author of B then B was made by
A, surely?

> "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.

Indeed, but nobody is suggesting that would be appropriate.

> rev="author" is clearly better semantics in the  above case?

Yes, if using rev.  Without rev it could be written as rel=made, because
made is the opposite of author.

> > 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)

Data of what people have actually done, with the existence of current
browsers and standards, informs many decisions.

> surely all it needed was to define some rev values (the same as rel)
> and people will start using rev correctly?

What semantics do you think authors who wrote rev=stylesheet were
meaning to convey?  Presumably not that the webpage containing it is the
style-sheet for the CSS file that it linked to -- so it's definitely a
mistake by the author.

If what the author meant to write was rel=stylesheet then HTML 5 is
surely an improvement, by dropping the confusing rev=stylesheet?

Or do you think something else is commonly meant by rev=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.
> 
> There are some cases where that is just not possible.

Which?

Smylers