This is an archived snapshot of W3C's public bugzilla bug tracker, decommissioned in April 2019. Please see the home page for more details.

Bug 26530 - reverse hyperlink attribute rev missing in HTML5
Summary: reverse hyperlink attribute rev missing in HTML5
Status: RESOLVED MOVED
Alias: None
Product: HTML WG
Classification: Unclassified
Component: CR HTML5 spec (show other bugs)
Version: unspecified
Hardware: PC Windows NT
: P2 normal
Target Milestone: ---
Assignee: Robin Berjon
QA Contact: HTML WG Bugzilla archive list
URL:
Whiteboard:
Keywords:
Depends on:
Blocks:
 
Reported: 2014-08-06 07:19 UTC by Christian Hujer
Modified: 2014-08-28 15:07 UTC (History)
2 users (show)

See Also:


Attachments

Description Christian Hujer 2014-08-06 07:19:37 UTC
Previous versions of (X)HTML had a rev attribute for the a and link elements (and XHTML 2 for nearly all elements) which allowed to specify the reverse relationship of hyperlinks.
This is very useful to create Index and Glossary entries in document collections.
For example, using something like

 <h2 id="compiler_gcc">Support for <a rev="Index">GCC<a></h2>

in a document foo.xhtml could automatically (i.e. using XSLT) create an Index entry <a href="foo.xhtml#compiler_gcc">GCC</a> in an Index document for that document collection.

The rev attribute seems to be completely forgotten, as it also is not listed in 11 Obsolete features http://www.w3.org/TR/html5/obsolete.html#obsolete

I think the rev attribute is a great feature, totally underestimated feature, please do not drop it from (X)HTML.
Comment 1 Michael[tm] Smith 2014-08-06 08:33:11 UTC
(In reply to Christian Hujer from comment #0)
> For example, using something like
> 
>  <h2 id="compiler_gcc">Support for <a rev="Index">GCC<a></h2>
> 
> in a document foo.xhtml could automatically (i.e. using XSLT) create an
> Index entry <a href="foo.xhtml#compiler_gcc">GCC</a> in an Index document
> for that document collection.

You could instead just mark up that example as, e.g., <a rel="IndexTerm">GCC</a>

> The rev attribute seems to be completely forgotten,

It's not forgotten. It was intentionally dropped in HTML5.
It's documented as a dropped attribute here:

  http://www.w3.org/TR/html5-diff/#obsolete-attributes

It's actually the first attribute listed there.

> as it also is not listed
> in 11 Obsolete features http://www.w3.org/TR/html5/obsolete.html#obsolete

That's a bug in the HTML5 spec. I've raised bug 26531 for it.
Comment 2 Robin Berjon 2014-08-28 15:07:16 UTC
Since this was intentionally dropped but is indeed not properly listed, and since Mike opened bug 26531 for that, we can close here.