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The paragraph after the HTML example code states, "In this case, the license applies to just the photo, not the whole document." However, the example is not marked up in a way that can be determined by assistive technology. If license is meant to apply to anything other than the entire document, the specification should define rules to make the relationship determinable by assistive technology.
The HTML Accessibility Task Force intends to track these issues, per the proposal at http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-html-a11y/2010Jan/0245.html.
Not entirely sure why this is a11y-related. However, the HTML+RDFa draft (and in XHTML, the XHTML+RDFa Rec) provides quite a simple solution. <a rel="license" href="licence-uri">...</a> Becomes: <a about="thing-uri" rel="license" href="licence-uri">...</a> Where thing-uri is the thing being licensed. So, if you wish to indicate the licence of an image: <a about="foobar.jpeg" rel="license" href="licence-uri">...</a> Or, if you have a paragraph of text on a page that needs licensing: <p id="chunk">...</p> <a about="#chunk" rel="license" href="licence-uri">...</a> etc. Microdata is also able to provide a solution, though I think RDFa's is somewhat more elegant in this simple case.
If you have the image in the page, in RDFa it looks like: <img src="foobar.jpeg" alt="..."> <a about="foobar.jpeg" rel="license" href="licence-uri">...</a> With microdata it looks like: <div itemscope itemtype="http://n.whatwg.org/work"> <img itemprop="work" src="foobar.jpeg" alt="..."> <a itemprop="license" href="licence-uri">...</a> </div>
EDITOR'S RESPONSE: This is an Editor's Response to your comment. If you are satisfied with this response, please change the state of this bug to CLOSED. If you have additional information and would like the editor to reconsider, please reopen this bug. If you would like to escalate the issue to the full HTML Working Group, please add the TrackerRequest keyword to this bug, and suggest title and text for the tracker issue; or you may create a tracker issue yourself, if you are able to do so. For more details, see this document: http://dev.w3.org/html5/decision-policy/decision-policy.html Status: Rejected Change Description: no spec change Rationale: Existing pages use rel=license as described in the spec. There isn't enough information in those pages for any algorithm (accessibility-related or otherwise) to identify the item to which the license applies. As Toby mentioned, that's why we have RDFa, or microdata, or other such solutions. I'm not sure, therefore, how to address this bug. Please reopen the bug if there is something I can do to further help here.
http://www.w3.org/2002/09/wbs/44061/20080513_bugs/results#xq9 Close and remove Task Force from further following. Ask on the main HTML list if someone wants to take over this bug to pursue getting the RDFa suggestion in the bug into the spec. http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-html/2010Aug/0337.html