Re: LINK and A

On Thu, 1 Oct 1998, John Whelan wrote:

> One of the things I had in mind was that a lot of times document A and
> document B have a particular relationship, and you want to encode one
> end of that relationship with a LINK element, but not really bother
> with the other end, since there's an A (anchor) element in the body of
> one document pointing to the other.  For instance if index.html acts
> as an index for foo.html, it's reasonable to put
> 
> <LINK REL="INDEX" HREF="index.html">
> 
> in foo.html, but it would seem redundant to include
> 
> <LINK REV="INDEX" HREF="foo.html">
> 
> in index.html because
> 	1) index.html is likely to have a REV="INDEX" relationship with
> a lot of other documents
> 	2) index.html is almost certain to have something like
> <A HREF="foo.html">Foo!</A> somewhere in its document body.
> 
> So it seems like a reasonable way to encode the other end of that
> relationship is to add the REV="INDEX" to the anchor tag, as in
> 
> <A HREF="foo.html" REV="INDEX">Foo!</A>

I agree with most of what you say.  But to go farther, I'd even say that
having <LINK REV="INDEX" HREF="foo.html"> whould be wrong.  I see a LINK
element as being a hyperlink attached to the whole document.  In this case
foo.html isn't related to thw whold document index.html, only the part of
it that says ``Foo!''.  So I'd say that <A HREF="foo.html"
REV=INDEX">Foo!</A> is not only more natural, it is more correct.

-- 
Russell O'Connor                           roconnor@uwaterloo.ca
    <URL:http://www.undergrad.math.uwaterloo.ca/%7Eroconnor/>
``And truth irreversibly destroys the meaning of its own message''
-- Anindita Dutta, ``The Paradox of Truth, the Truth of Entropy''

Received on Friday, 2 October 1998 11:35:20 UTC