[whatwg] Regarding "Examples for rel=tag"

[Hugh Guiney]

On Fri, Sep 14, 2012 at 9:51 PM, Ian Hickson <ian at hixie.ch> wrote:
>> Also, as I pointed out in the original post, consumers already use
>> rel=tag intending for it to apply only to portions of a page.
>
> Consumers or producers? What matters here is not changing _consumer_
> behaviour, so that we don't break pages written with the assumption that
> they work as they do now.

Ah, yeah, misunderstood "consumer" as a synonym for "author". Your
reasoning does makes more sense to me now.

But, I would still say that if existing consumer behavior is to apply
tags to the entire document, then that is simply a limitation of
producers not being able to explicitly say that certain tags only
apply to portions of the page... which is actually an open issue on
the Microformats Wiki for rel-tag[1], something that the HTML spec
could potentially solve, and which <article> seems well-suited to
solve.

How badly would this actually break existing parsers? Could it really
be worse than multiple <address>es? Or <style scoped>?

And again, it isn't evident to me that pages *are* written with the
assumption that robots work this way, as evidenced by WordPress's
assignment of tags on a post-by-post basis[2], marked up with
rel=tag[3], posts themselves being marked up with <article>, and
multiple <article>s being displayed at once in the post listing views.
As WordPress is currently the most popular blogging platform on the
Internet[4], it represents significant existing usage of the
attribute.

[1]: http://microformats.org/wiki/rel-tag-issues (No anchor but see
"2006-04-06 raised by Evan")
[2]: http://codex.wordpress.org/images/b/b6/write1.png (See sidebar
section "Post Tags")
[3]: http://twentytwelvedemo.wordpress.com/blog/ (Inspect element any
category or tag link)
[4]: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=WordPress&oldid=512508447
(first paragraph last sentence)