[whatwg] Absent rev?

[Philip Taylor]

On Wed, Nov 19, 2008 at 1:03 PM, Martin McEvoy <martin at weborganics.co.uk> wrote:
> Philip Taylor wrote:
>> http://philip.html5.org/data/link-rel-rev.txt has some more recent
>> data, from a different set of pages (and so with different biases,
>> e.g. there's lots of Wikipedia and IMDB pages using
>> rel="apple-touch-icon"), with less processing (no case-insensitivity
>> or token-splitting).
>
> Thank you Philip that is the most useful set of data I have seen for a long
> time
>
> It basically says that the whole premise that HTML5 should drop *rev*  (a)
> because authors use it wrong, (b)  Many authors use rev-stylesheet  wrong,
>  is a MYTH and an inaccurate assessment of  the *rev* attribute
>
> Out of the 127249 pages studied, only  0.09% actually use rev="stylesheet"

The premise from near the beginning of this thread was:

> 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="".

I think that ought to say "... (excluding rev=made, which is
uninteresting since it's redundant with rel=author) ...". In that
case, rev is used on 0.2% of pages, which justifies the claim "almost
never used". And rev=stylesheet makes up 57% of those uses of rev,
which justifies the claim "most of the time ... it was a typo" (under
a loose definition of "typo" that includes people copying-and-pasting
without understanding the distinction between rel and rev, which is
the impression I get from looking at some of these pages). And looking
at some other values, e.g. <link rev="start" href="/" title="Home
Page" /> which seems like it ought to be rel instead, there are typos
in more cases than just rev=stylesheet. So the premise seems valid.

-- 
Philip Taylor
excors at gmail.com