[Bug 7475] Semantics of rel=first and rel=index breaks specs and implementations

http://www.w3.org/Bugs/Public/show_bug.cgi?id=7475


Ian 'Hixie' Hickson <ian@hixie.ch> changed:

           What    |Removed                     |Added
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
             Status|REOPENED                    |RESOLVED
         Resolution|                            |WONTFIX




--- Comment #5 from Ian 'Hixie' Hickson <ian@hixie.ch>  2010-01-04 09:18:20 ---
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Status: Rejected
Change Description: no spec change
Rationale: 

Thank you for this research. It is consistent with the results I had found
myself when studying this several years ago.

While I agree with you that the few client implementations that support these
values have indeed been considering these as separate meanings, that in itself
is not a convincing argument. It is clear that as designed so far, the feature
has been a failure (virtually nobody uses it). The main way to increase the
likelihood that something like this will be used is to simplify it, which is
part of what HTML5 does.

In actual use, I would guess that WordPress is amongst the biggest users of
this feature. According to your table, if I'm not misreading it, WordPress uses
"index" (and "start") as defined in HTML5. It doesn't have separate index and
toc pages. Indeed none of the other CMSes you list use "index" at all. Plone
and DotClear use "contents", but it's not clear if the distinction they make is
especially good from a usability perspective.

I do agree that the definitions in HTML5 rock the boat. However, given the
utter mess we are starting with, and given the rarity of these features, I
think it is a worthwhile cost. The alternative, IMHO, quite apart from making
the feature more complicated by having more keywords, would be to just drop the
whole thing altogether.

(Note that the word "index" here is not used in the printed-book sense, but in
the sense of "index.html", the default page on Apache.)


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Received on Monday, 4 January 2010 09:18:22 UTC