link relation metadata considerations, was: Update on Issue-27, was: ACTION-182 and Issue-27

On 13.08.2010 12:23, Julian Reschke wrote:
> ...
> 2) There has been one registration attempt for two new pieces of
> application data in the registry
> (<http://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/link-relations/current/msg00000.html>).
> For these we had several questions about the actual fields, their
> defaults, and what spec to reference
> (<http://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/link-relations/current/msg00030.html>).
> For the technical questions, I'll start separate threads over here,
> because we'd like to see whether there's a WG consensus behind these
> registrations.
> ...

OK, here we go.

Let's have a look at <http://dev.w3.org/html5/spec/links.html#linkTypes>.

Observations:

a) There are link types not allowed on <link>.

b) There are link types not allowed on <a>/<area>.

c) *When* a link type is allowed on both, the "effect" is the same for both.


Questions I'd like this Working Group to consider:

1) What's the use case for link relations not allowed on <link>?

Right now, there are four:

bookmark: the only reason this *currently* doesn't make sense page-wide 
is because the definition was changed from what HTML4 said.

external, nofollow, noreferrer: no idea why they would be disallowed.


2) If there are currently no cases where the "effect" on a link would 
depend on whether it's <link> or <a>/<area>... maybe this distinction is 
meaningless, and a better categorization would be:

i) what the effect is on links in general (no matter where they appear), and

ii) where they are allowed (in that if they are not a conformance 
checker would complain).


3) Is it a good idea to let document conformance depend on link 
relations anyway? Are conformance checkers going to implement this? 
Right now they do not.


It would be nice to get some feedback on this from the WG before I start 
adding entries to BugZilla.

Best regards, Julian

Received on Friday, 13 August 2010 11:50:42 UTC