Re: combining relations from multiple link elements, Re: ISSUE-125: charset-vs-quotes - Straw Poll for Objections

On Feb 21, 2011, at 2:09 AM, Philip Jägenstedt wrote:

> On Mon, 21 Feb 2011 09:42:51 +0100, Julian Reschke <julian.reschke@gmx.de> wrote:
> 
>> On 21.02.2011 04:50, Paul Cotton wrote:
>>> ISSUE-125: charset-vs-quotes - Straw Poll for Objections
>>> 
>>> The poll is available here and it will run through Monday Feb 28th:
>>> 
>>> http://www.w3.org/2002/09/wbs/40318/issue-125-objection-poll/
>>> 
>>> Please read the introductory text before entering your response.
>>> 
>>> In particular, keep in mind that you don't *have* to reply. You only
>>> need to do so if you feel your objection to one of the options is truly
>>> strong, and has not been adequately addressed by a clearly marked
>>> objection contained within a Change Proposal or by someone else's
>>> objection. The Chairs will be looking at strength of objections, and
>>> will not be counting votes.
>>> 
>>> /paulc
>>> 
>>> Paul Cotton, Microsoft Canada
>>> ...
>> 
>> In the poll results, Philip Jägenstedt writes (<http>://www.w3.org/2002/09/wbs/40318/issue-124-objection-poll/results>):
>> 
>>> Finally, the change proposal doesn't specify how to handle conflicting information like this in a page:
>>> 
>>> <link rel="stylesheet noreferrer" href="foo.css">
>>> <link rel="stylesheet nofollow" href="foo.css">
>>> 
>>> Is the effective set of keywords "noreferrer", "nofollow" or "noreferrer nofollow"? Presumably both browsers and search engines would be clever enough to only issue one request, but should the search engine consider "that the link is not endorsed by the original author or publisher of the page" and should a browser "not include a Referer (sic) HTTP header"?
>> 
>> That's a good question but I don't see how this is specific to these link relations.
>> 
>> The spec should have generic statements about how to combine multiple link/@rel elements. If this is a serious problem (*), a bug should be opened independently of this issue.
> 
> To avoid confusion, this is about ISSUE-124 rel-limits, not ISSUE-125.
> 
> At first I agreed that this should be defined more generally and tried to formulate the problem, but failed: http://www.w3.org/Bugs/Public/show_bug.cgi?id=12145
> 
> I actually agree that nofollow isn't much different from most other link types, but AFAICT no existing keyword type has the problem that allowing noreferrer on <link> introduces, namely that the order changes browser behavior:
> 
> <link rel="stylesheet" href="foo.css">
> <!-- potential network lag here -->
> <link rel="stylesheet noreferrer" href="foo.css">
> 
> Is the HTTP Referer header sent when fetching foo.css? Unless there already exists link types where this problem arises for (browser) imlpementations, I'd argue that the CP that introduces the problem should also fix it.

It seems like the issue here is:

- Some <link> types (e.g. stylesheet, icon) can passively trigger loads, which are combined when loading the same resource.
- <a> links only load something when explicitly activated by the user, so there is no issue of combining loads.
- noreferrer alters loading behavior.

As a result, noreferrer has clear behavior on <a>, but not necessarily on <link>.

Regards,
Maciej

Received on Monday, 21 February 2011 20:14:54 UTC