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Bug 12223 - Drop rel=help. It's for showing a button in the browser's UI which no browser shows by default. It doesn't seem to be helpful for users, so just wastes authors' time.
Summary: Drop rel=help. It's for showing a button in the browser's UI which no browser...
Status: RESOLVED FIXED
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 19:56 UTC by contributor
Modified: 2011-08-04 05:33 UTC (History)
6 users (show)

See Also:

Attachments

Description contributor 2011-03-02 19:56:27 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-help

Comment:
Drop rel=help. It's for showing a button in the browser's UI which no browser
shows by default. It doesn't seem to be helpful for users, so just wastes
authors' time.

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 20:11:32 UTC 
Disagreed. It was in HTML4, and it appears to be well-defined.
Comment 2 Ian 'Hixie' Hickson 2011-05-05 21:46:19 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: This one is pretty borderline, but for <a href="" rel=help> it seems like the kind of thing that could be helpful to provide styling hooks (e.g. to turn help links into little circled question marks).

The <link rel=help> seems pretty useless though. If you want just that one removed, we can probably do that. Reopen the bug if that's what you want.
Comment 3 Aryeh Gregor 2011-05-06 16:02:36 UTC 
If that's the purpose, why don't you include :link[rel~=help] { cursor: help } in the UA stylesheet?  Otherwise it's not really any different from class=help from an authoring perspective.
Comment 4 Ian 'Hixie' Hickson 2011-05-06 20:20:28 UTC 
The only difference to class=help is that this one has a defined semantic meaning so that you don't have to work out what the class is defined as when moving from one project to another. This is the same as why we have most attributes and elements in the language rather than just letting authors invent their own language with each project.

We could do :link[rel~=help] { cursor: help }, is that a common UI?
Comment 5 Aryeh Gregor 2011-05-06 20:54:51 UTC 
If rel=help does nothing out of the box, nobody's going to know about it or use it, and if they do use it they'll misuse it, as with any hidden metadata.  If it turns the cursor into a help icon, people will say "Hey, cool, rel=help turns the cursor into a help icon", and while they might not use it for all their help links, you can be sure they'll *only* use it for help links.  This improves the value for everyone.

People use features correctly only when their visible effects make it obvious how to use them.  Authors usually use <ol> only for its intended purpose, because the visible effect is useless for other purposes.  They do not use <br> only for its intended purpose, because the visible effect is useful for lots of purposes.  They don't use rel=help at all because it has no visible effect.

If your only use-case is "could be used for author styling hooks", then class serves the exact same use-case.  Porting between sites is not an advantage of rel=help unless you believe that a) lots of sites use <a rel=help> (they don't), and b) it's reasonably common to copy raw HTML between them (seems unlikely), and c) you'd actually want to adopt the new site's styles for rel=help (not necessarily: what if site A just turns it a different color and depends on the text being visible, while site B replaces the text with an icon because all its help links' text is "Help"?).

I've definitely seen help cursors used in some places for help links.  I can't find any right now, though.  Most apps don't have links to separate help pages these days anyway.
Comment 6 Ian 'Hixie' Hickson 2011-08-03 07:03:44 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: Partially Accepted
Change Description: see diff given below
Rationale: Agreed with comment 3.
Comment 7 contributor 2011-08-03 07:04:41 UTC 
Checked in as WHATWG revision r6357.
Check-in comment: Try to make <a rel=help> more useful.
http://html5.org/tools/web-apps-tracker?from=6356&to=6357
Comment 8 Michael[tm] Smith 2011-08-04 05:33:49 UTC 
mass-move component to LC1