[whatwg] Adding "canonical" to the list of allowed link types

[Ian Hickson]

On Mon, 13 Jul 2009, James Ide wrote:
>
> Currently rel="canonical" ( 
> http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/02/specify-your-canonical.html) 
> is not in the allowed set of link types listed at 
> http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/#linkTypes . Looking 
> back through archived posts, it seems that it was once briefly mentioned 
> in passing but there was no discussion regarding its addition to the 
> spec. Considering its usefulness, are there plans to add "canonical" to 
> the official list of accepted values?

On Tue, 14 Jul 2009, Aryeh Gregor wrote:
> 
> I'd support this.  There are many cases with web apps when you want to 
> present slightly different versions of the same content, where the 
> differences are convenient to regular users but immaterial to first-time 
> users, such that search engines should treat them interchangeably or 
> present a single canonical version to new visitors rather than treating 
> them as separate pages.  In principle you might think search engines 
> could figure this out themselves heuristically, but the three biggest 
> have apparently decided they could use some help, so it seems like a 
> valuable feature.
> 
> Of course, the way the new value was developed and introduced was 
> certainly not ideal.  But the same is true for a lot of the things that 
> go into the HTML 5 spec.

On Wed, 15 Jul 2009, Bil Corry wrote:
> 
> It's is currently listed on the RelExtensions wiki page as referenced by 
> the HTML5 draft:
> 
> 	http://wiki.whatwg.org/wiki/RelExtensions

What Bil said. To go further, it will need a formal spec.

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