Comments on: Todays quiz - rel attribute

By: Peter Vigren

Peter Vigren — Mon, 12 Mar 2007 14:47:31 +0000

Ah, I wrote my message in response to the earlier posts of icaaq; now that it has been posted I see he already has brought up what I responded to his messages (i.e. the use of profiles etc).

By: Peter Vigren

Peter Vigren — Mon, 12 Mar 2007 14:13:45 +0000

icaaq, Your link to the specification of HTML 4.01 that say: “Authors may wish to define additional link types not described in this specification. If they do so, they should use a profile to cite the conventions used to define the link types. Please see the profile attribute of the HEAD element for more details.” It is a bit harder to find information for XHTML for me though… But if the rel-discussion is for this particular site, then I would guess XHTML Transitional probably works the same way. Besides, you are already using the XFN profile… But the question itself is tricky… If I would look only on the predefined values, it’s quite hard to find a sufficient value. I thought maybe “Appendix” would work if you either reference text from that page or something like that. But I really don’t know. It feels like those predefined values only handle links on and to your site and not links to others. So maybe it’s better to reference the “relatedness” in text or a list of links related to the page.

By: icaaq

icaaq — Mon, 12 Mar 2007 13:44:28 +0000

After a discussion with Emil Stenstr�m ( http://www.friendlybit.com ). I came to the conclusion that the relation between documents should be defined with the rel attribute using the link-types as values, and if a custom link-type is used then a profile to cite the conventions should be used in the head element.

http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/struct/links.html#idx-link-2 http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/types.html#type-links http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/struct/global.html#adef-profile

Cheers.

By: icaaq

icaaq — Mon, 12 Mar 2007 11:23:03 +0000

I would say that, take a look at the optional attributes on http://www.w3schools.com/tags/tag_a.asp

And the WHATWG is more specific in that area:

The type of link indicated (the relationship) is given by the value of the rel attribute, which must be present, and must have a value that is an unordered set of space-separated tokens. The allowed values and their meanings are defined in a later section. If the rel attribute is absent, or if the value used is not allowed according to the definitions in this specification, then the element does not define a link.

http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/#rel

Cheers

By: Jens

Jens — Mon, 12 Mar 2007 10:20:11 +0000

I looked at that page. So you�re saying that rel values are invalid except the one you you�re linking to?

By: icaaq

icaaq — Mon, 12 Mar 2007 10:15:06 +0000

There’s no “related” option in the link types specified in (x)HTML (http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/types.html#type-links).

I think none of the above link types suites your dilemma, I would skip the rel-attribute and maybe go for a nice description in the title-attribute instead.

OT: and there’s no “no-follow” option in the linktypes either.

Cheers