RE: ISSUE-118 CP 3, rel="start" and friends, rant

To Ian Hickson / whom this may concern,

I second what DriedFruit says in his email, "ISSUE-118 CP 3, rel="start" and friends, rant":
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-html-comments/2011Jul/0000.html

I too, was surprised to find that my previously valid web page suddenly had four errors according to the W3C validator, all of them relating to values found in REL attribute of A or LINK elements – two of which are microformats: rel-home and rel-licence)!

I put it down to tinkering with the validator; after all, HTML5 support is currently experimental, but after reading this list, it looks as if this is going to become an official "feature"!

I also believe that the range of values for the META element's HTTP-EQUIV and NAME are much too restrictive. Why can't you just allow arbitrary values for the attributes mentioned above? To not do so will not only break backwards-compatibility with *existing* technologies, it's also restrictive for *future* technologies too.

I hope that you take the time to reconsider this.

Thanks for your time,

Jordan Clark
http://www.jdclark.org