Re: Link type order

On Sun, 1 Dec 2002 05:14:11 -0600, John Lewis <lewi0371@mrs.umn.edu> wrote:

> Does the order of link types matter? In HTML 4.01 section 6.12
> <http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/types.html#h-6.12> says the following:

Order doesn't matter for the link types, link types are quite similar to 
HTML classes, except that link types are case insensitive. <link ref="next 
help"> and <link rel="help next"> both describe a link with the help and 
next link types. In other contexts the order might matter, e.g. a CSS 
selector link[rel="next help"] will not match <link rel="help next"> (while 
a CSS selector like link[rel~="next"][rel~="help"] would).

> And every example I can find on in HTML 4.01 and w3.org follows this
> order. Shouldn't "stylesheet alternate" be equal to "alternate
> stylesheet"? I can't find a section in HTML that defines order to be
> important or unimportant in link types, so I'm assuming it's
> unimportant. Any sort of reference or insights would be helpful.

Yes, <link rel="stylesheet alternate"> is the same as <link rel="alternate 
stylesheet">. The description in 14.3.2 ('To specify an alternate style 
sheet, set the rel attribute to "alternate stylesheet" and name the style 
sheet with the title attribute.') is confusing. It doesn't say that you 
shouldn't use 'stylesheet alternate', but unless you actually have read all 
of the chapters 6, 12, and 14, you can be excused for believing that 
"alternate stylesheet" is one link type and not two. In addition, the 
mechanism itself is clumsy and non-intuitive, and I really hope we can do 
better than this for XHTML 2.0.

-- 
Jonny Axelsson,
Web Standards,
Opera Software

Received on Sunday, 1 December 2002 08:23:45 UTC