Re: ISSUE-27: rel-ownership - Chairs Solicit Proposals

On Dec 29, 2009, at 3:35 PM, Leif Halvard Silli wrote:

> Hi Mark,
> 
> When you, Roy or anyone else makes bold claims about "confusion" about 
> what HTML 4 says, then it would be extremely helpful if you could 
> provide an exegesis that that demonstrate those claims.
> 
> I followed your pointer to Roy's message - and what did I see? I saw 
> hat Roy has not read HTML 4 correctly. HTML 4 says _exactly_ what Roy 
> says, namely: Links are not reversible. But relationships are. (That 
> relationships are reversible doesn't mean that the _words_ for those 
> relationships are reversible - @rev doesn't create antonyms ... of 
> course.)

I doubt that your reinterpretation and rephrasing of what HTML4
says is going to enlighten my interpretation of what the spec
actually has written.  I know what rel and rev does in reality,
and that agrees with your [2].  What I disagreed with is the
specific words used to define that reality in HTML4, which
has been misinterpreted by *other* spec writers to mean
that the link is reversed (not the semantics), and hence the
discussion about it in the Link draft.

> I have provided an exegesis of what HTML 4 says which demonstrates that 
> this is so [1][2]. I produced it without knowing about Roy's message - 
> I came to this conclusion _solely_ by reading HTML 4.
> 
> It is indeed true, also, that HTML 4 could have used a clearer wording. 
> But if one reads HTML 4 the same way that HTML 5 says one should read 
> HTML 5 [3], then it ought to be pretty obvious that there is no other 
> possible interpretation of HTML 4 than the one Roy have. In other 
> words: HTML 4 is says the same that previous specifications has said.
> 
> If you or anyone have another interpretation of HTML 4, then please 
> provide something that makes your interpretation credible. Or else we 
> should put those claims aside as unfounded.

Why is that even remotely relevant?  The claims exist whether or not
they can be demonstrated false.  Moreover, you just replied to someone
who claimed the exact opposite of your interpretation of the very
same words, so clearly someone is confused.

HTML5 says under hyperlink

   For <a> and <area> elements that represent hyperlinks, the
   relationship between the document containing the hyperlink
   and the destination resource indicated by the hyperlink is
   given by the value of the element's rel attribute, which
   must be a set of space-separated tokens. The allowed values
   and their meanings are defined below. The rel attribute has
   no default value. If the attribute is omitted or if none of
   the values in the attribute are recognized by the user agent,
   then the document has no particular relationship with the
   destination resource other than there being a hyperlink
   between the two.

and something different under link.  Neither can be interpreted
with any sense of conviction because "resource" is used in several
contradictory ways in the spec, as is "default" and "context"
(presumably in this case because Ian decided to remove the notion
of an anchor as a conceptual framework for describing links).
In any case, rev is gone from HTML5, and therefore the description
of its semantics is no longer in the draft.

I think the issue in the subject is solely about who owns the
relation registry.  Since the relations must be independent of
media type, I think it is obvious that HTML cannot own the
registry.  YMMV.

> [1] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-html/2009Dec/0409
> [2] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-html/2009Dec/0410
> [3] 
> http://dev.w3.org/html5/spec/Overview.html#how-to-read-this-specification

BTW, [3] is lame, even if read as a sarcastic joke.

....Roy

Received on Wednesday, 30 December 2009 03:20:44 UTC