Re: link header rev parameters, was: Last Call: draft-nottingham-http-link-header (Web Linking) to Proposed Standard

On Thu, Aug 20, 2009 at 2:58 PM, Julian Reschke <julian.reschke@gmx.de>wrote:

> Mark Nottingham wrote:
>
>> ...
>>
>>> The Link: header has a "rev" attribute. I would recommend dropping it for
>>> consistency with HTML5; we discovered in examining typical usage that
>>> people generally didn't understand how to use rev="", and it is redundant
>>> with rel="" anyway. If it is kept, then please define how it works.
>>> Allowing something but leaving it undefined is the worst of both worlds.
>>> (The ideal would be to define how it works but not allow it, IMHO.)
>>>
>>
>> It was included because it's in the syntax of RFC2068, but I agree that
>> it's not desirable to perpetuate it. How do people feel about further
>> removing it (i.e., it will be an extension, not called out explicitly in the
>> syntax)?
>> ...
>>
>
> I think that not mentioning it will cause both confusion ("where did it go
> and why?") and extra work (it being re-defined for certain relations).
>
> Thus it seems to me that the spec should document it in any case. If
> there's a consensus that it's a bad thing to use, we should add that to the
> documentation, essentially deprecating it.
>

Given the attribute is rarely used (and when it is it's generally abused -
e.g. rev=canonical) I would suggest that following HTML 5's example and
jumping straight to obsolesence is a better idea than deprecation.

Sam