Re: LINK types

On Tue, 24 Feb 2004, Age Bosma wrote:

> Lately I'm trying to big into web accessibility a bit more.

For the most of it, <link> does not help accessibility. It makes the use
of a page more comfortable on some browsers, and may affect indexing
robots. For accessibility, use links (i.e., <a href>), not <link>.

> I'm wondering how some link types are supposed to be used.

Studying the behavior of Mozilla, Opera, and other advancing browsers is
the practical approach.

Regarding the topic of this discussion list, I think we can mostly say
just that rel attribute values should have been standardized years ago
and it would still help to do that now, but that there's probably no work
in progress, since the discussion revolves around XLinks and other
theoretical constructions.

> The problem is, nobody is actually providing
> examples on when or how they should be used.

Because there is no specification, just vague notes

> I'm even starting to wonder
> if some of them are actually being used at all.

Mostly not.

> Types like Stylesheet, Start, Next, Prev and Copyright and pretty self
> explanatory and are generally being used.

Apart from rel="stylesheet", they have rather marginal use. You still need
to have explicit links, for the vast majority who uses <link>-challenged
browsers, so what's the point?

> E.g. Section and Subsection, explained on the w3c site as "Refers to a
> document serving as a (sub)section in a collection of documents". How
> are they to be used?

Beats me. I'm afraid the spec is _intentionally_ vague. But I've used them
to specify sections and subsections _inside a document_. It's duplication
of course, since a normal ToC is needed too.

-- 
Jukka "Yucca" Korpela, http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/

Received on Tuesday, 24 February 2004 11:48:19 UTC