Re: Related/Forward Links

> I'm looking for insight into browser/agent support for related links (<link 
> rel="">) in header data.

This came up recently on this or another W3C list.

> I seem to recall that Lynx renders related links as hyperlinks at the top of 
> the page? I'm wondering if this treatment is commonplace in other browsers, 

No.  IE does not support it.  (Latest versions of other browsers, e.g.
Netscape 7, do, although it is disabled by default in, at least,
the earlier Mozilla versions that support it.)  The options for
Mozilla are: no-display, always display, display only if at least one
is present.

> and what alternate rendering schemes people have encountered.  Highly useful 
> would be information on how helpful these links are to those using 
> text-to-speech or braille oriented technologies.

They are essentially unknown to mass market authors, so there is little
precedent for their use.  rev=made dropped out of the spec, even though
it is better than meta author, which was introduced without consideration
for the link mechanism.  Quite a lot of meta keys would make sense as
URLs, and therefore would be better suited to link (my own theory is
that meta is mainly a way of dumping the document info from MS Word into
HTML).

> differently in each agent? Are there practical advantages to using <link 
> rel="bookmark" href="#search" title="Search This Website"> over <link 
> rel="search" href="#search" title="Search This Website">? I notice this is 

These too have rather different meanings.  I would argue that the first
should only be used on "a" elements.  Search means that you are going
somewhere to do searches.  Bookmark means that you are going direct to
a sub-heading in a larger page, but is normally used as part of page
that only consists of an outline of the bigger document.  (Note that 
rel and rev can be use on a elements, not just link.)

> done on the W3C home page. Any disadvantages to the creative use of both?

Same as for any abuse of markup.

Mozilla prefers certain link types and relegates others to a second level
menu.

Received on Sunday, 15 December 2002 16:42:11 UTC