LINK Element Confusion

Dear Fellow Subscribers;

One year ago (August 1997), the following was posted and can be found 
in the archives:

Link source/destination confusion Ka-Ping Yee

This posting was never addressed, and I hope this time there are
those who will respond.

Not only is there confusion regarding definitions of REL and REV, as
pointed out by Mr. Yee; but, also, confusion regarding values these
attributes can take. For example, consider the various ways an
index.html document can state that it is the beginning document:

 REV="TOP"
 REV="BEGIN"
 REV="START"
 REV="PARENT"
 REV="TOC"

All of these are proposed in various documents and are quite
confusing and ambiguous as to the nuances of their use, except for
possibly the latter. This is exemplified in section B4 of the
following appendix:

http://www.w3.org/TR/1998/REC-html40-19980424/appendix/notes.html#recs

Under B4, the paragraph, "Indicate the Beginning of a Collection", 
states use rel="start" but the example that follows has rel="begin".

I have seen various statements to the effect the user agents "don't
do anything intelligent" with <LINK> information anyway. Could all
this confusion have some bearing on this?

Mr. Yee's letter was addressed to the editors of the HTML 4.0 
specification. I hope his concerns and those addressed here will be 
taken seriously. The <LINK> element has great possibilities. Maybe it 
would be used more if the average HTML author could be given a simple 
explanation of its use and a simple set of rules to follow.

Sincerely,


Bo Holloman
1360 Riverwood Drive
Jackson, Mississippi 39211

(601) 952-0015
(601) 977-9416

Received on Friday, 14 August 1998 21:57:58 UTC