[whatwg] Absent rev?

[Martin McEvoy]

Tab Atkins Jr. wrote:
> On Wed, Nov 19, 2008 at 9:26 AM, Philip Taylor 
> <excors+whatwg at gmail.com <mailto:excors%2Bwhatwg at gmail.com>> wrote:
>
>     On Wed, Nov 19, 2008 at 2:54 PM, Martin McEvoy
>     <martin at weborganics.co.uk <mailto:martin at weborganics.co.uk>> wrote:
>     > Philip Taylor wrote:
>     >>
>     >> rev=stylesheet makes up 57% of those uses of rev,
>     >>
>     >
>     > How do you get that figure?
>     >
>     > even if you just compare rev="made"(1157 instances) and
>     rev="stylesheet"(107
>     > instances) you get 9.25% of the examples use rev incorrectly
>
>     That figure was from the case of
>
>     > "... (excluding rev=made, which is
>     > uninteresting since it's redundant with rel=author) ...".
>
>     since that appears to be what Hixie meant (but forgot to say) when
>     claiming that most uses of rev were typos of rel.
>
>     (Case-insensitively, I counted 1259 rev="made", 122 rev="stylesheet",
>     and 1474 rev="..." in total, which means 215 in total excluding
>     rev="made", and 122/215=57%.)
>
>     --
>     Philip Taylor
>     excors at gmail.com <mailto:excors at gmail.com>
>
>
> In addition, a large proportion (looks like a majority, but I haven't 
> explicitly calculated) of the remaining @rev showing up is rev="home", 
> rev="back", rev="toc" etc. which is clearly incorrect.  Those people 
> are assuming the @rev is meant to be a "go back" link, rather than 
> just expressing a reverse-semantic version of @rel.  (I highly doubt 
> that these are links *from* home pages to inner pages, which would be 
> necessary for the semantics to work correctly.) 
>
> There are also a couple (3, it seems) of rev="shortcut icon", which is 
> a similar typo to the rev="stylesheet" one, and several rev="owns" and 
> similar which suffers from the same redundancy as rev="made" (just 
> replace it with rel="owner").
>
> So, by this survey, it looks like there's less than 50 correct and 
> not-obviously-redundant uses of rev out of 127k, which puts it under 
> 0.04%.
>
> ~TJ
>
>
Here is my take on the subject.

There are 1517 instances of @rev

of those:

"made" occurs 83% of the time (1259 instances)
"stylesheet" occurs 8.2% of the time (124 instances)
The rest occur 8.9% of the time (135 instances)

the misuse of "stylesheet" is trivial and only a matter of informing 
authors of their error, the fact that a high amount of authors are using 
rev-made is Inspiring to say the least, because every made link type is 
a claim of ownership, not authorship two totally different semantics.

I will study the results of @rel soon but from first glance It seems 
there is (statistically) more abuse and misunderstanding about @rel than 
there will ever be than @rev

Thanks

-- 
Martin McEvoy

http://weborganics.co.uk/