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Bug 12222 - Drop rel=external. It doesn't do anything anywhere. Pages that use it mostly use it as a scripting hook to inject target=_blank to get around validation.
Summary: Drop rel=external. It doesn't do anything anywhere. Pages that use it mostly ...
Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 11181
Alias: None
Product: HTML WG
Classification: Unclassified
Component: LC1 HTML5 spec (show other bugs)
Version: unspecified
Hardware: Other other
: P3 normal
Target Milestone: ---
Assignee: Ian 'Hixie' Hickson
QA Contact: HTML WG Bugzilla archive list
URL: http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/...
Whiteboard:
Keywords:
Depends on:
Blocks:
 
Reported: 2011-03-02 19:54 UTC by contributor
Modified: 2011-08-04 05:35 UTC (History)
6 users (show)

See Also:

Attachments

Description contributor 2011-03-02 19:54:41 UTC 
Specification: http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/complete/links.html
Section: http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/#link-type-external

Comment:
Drop rel=external. It doesn't do anything anywhere. Pages that use it mostly
use it as a scripting hook to inject target=_blank to get around validation.

Posted from: 85.227.154.141
User agent: Opera/9.80 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.5.8; U; en) Presto/2.7.62 Version/11.01
Comment 1 Julian Reschke 2011-03-02 20:08:58 UTC 
Yes. Please go ahead.
Comment 2 Ian 'Hixie' Hickson 2011-05-05 21:33:13 UTC 
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: People use it for styling external links differently than internal links.
Comment 3 Simon Pieters 2011-05-05 22:56:08 UTC 
Citation needed.

http://www.google.com/codesearch?as_q=%5C%5Brel%7E%3F%3D%28%22%7C%27%29external+lang%3Acss&btnG=Search+Code&hl=en&as_package=&as_lang=&as_filename=&as_class=&as_function=&as_license=&as_case=

shows 30 matches for 

   \[rel~?=("|')external lang:css

which is close to nothing. In comparison

   \.external

finds 2,400 and

   \[href\^=("|')?http lang:css

finds 549.

An attribute selector works and doesn't need to clutter the markup, and if the author wants to annotate the markup for external links for styling, a class selector has wider support than an attribute selector (works in IE6).
Comment 4 Julian Reschke 2011-05-06 19:30:27 UTC 
This might be a duplicate of of 11181, which has been raised as http://www.w3.org/html/wg/tracker/issues/153
Comment 5 Ian 'Hixie' Hickson 2011-06-09 23:00:59 UTC 
Attribute selectors on href="" don't work in large deployments where a site spans multiple domains.

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 11181 ***
Comment 6 Michael[tm] Smith 2011-08-04 05:35:36 UTC 
mass-move component to LC1