[whatwg] Absent rev?

Smylers Smylers at stripey.com
Tue Nov 18 05:37:00 PST 2008


Martin McEvoy writes:

> Smylers wrote:
> 
> > Martin McEvoy writes:
> >
> > > !! 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?
> 
> Its not explicit enough, there are times when there is a need to
> express  explicit relationships to things, a uniqueness that only you
> can relate  to, rev= is an explicit one way relationship from A to B

Sorry, I'm being unimaginative; please could you give an instance of
such a time?  Thanks.

> another example is ... An explicit one way relationship I might like
> to add to the hyperlink above may be rev="reply"

Or you could use rel with a word that means the opposite of reply, such
as rel=subject to denote the subject of your reply.

> > > "I have just finished this new  <a rel="author"
> > > href="http://coolsite.co.uk/"> Cool website</a> check it out""
> > >
> > > 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.
> 
> ?... in the above example that would say <http://coolsite.co.uk/> made
> the referring page? ....

No, rel=author would say coolsite was the author of the current page,
whereas rel=made would say that the current page made coolsite; that's
the same as saying that coolsite was authored by the current page (which
is what rev=author would do).

> > > > The second most common value was rev="stylesheet", which is
> > > > meaningless and obviously meant to be rel="stylesheet".
> 
> That's just a matter of educating people

How would you propose we do that?  Clearly it's failed so far.

> not saying lets take rev away because you don't know how to use it?

If the number of people misusing rev was dwarfed by the much bigger of
correct uses of it, then obviously it wouldn't make sense to remove it.
But given that one of the most popular things to do with rev is to
misuse it, it clearly doesn't have much of a following for its intended
purpose.

> > > > Anything that could be done with rev="" can be done with rel=""
> > > > with an opposite keyword, so this omission should be easy to
> > > > handle.
> 
> as I have demonstrated above rev= a uniqueness, something that ONLY
> <A> can say about <B> .

I think I've demonstrated the opposite!

Smylers



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