Link types

The <A> element has some attributes I have never used. Some of them are
said to be used for "link types". I've seen link types being described by
TimBL in a very early paper, and they are vaugely described in the spec
aswell, but I still don't get the whole picture of what use these have. I'm
so used with the "get and show this resource" kind of linking that I can't
think in other ways. Is there any resources, apart from the spec, that
explains the use of link types, or could someone explain it here?

Thanks,

Gustaf

Gustaf Liljegren <gus...@algonet.se> wrote:

You mean REL and REV attributes, right?

There have been various memos and proposals, but not much has come out
of the discussions. Actually much of the talk, and of the actual
implementations that use those attributes for something, has revolved
around them as used for <LINK>, not <A>.

In practical terms, there's not much point in using REL or REV for <A>.
Browsers don't make use of them, and in fact, the values that the
specification lists as having "conventional interpretations" are
vaguely defined and certainly inadequate for _most_ links that we
write! There's nothing suitable for 'see also...' or 'compare to...' or
'for arguments, see' or 'subpage of this site' or 'main page of this
site'.

--
Yucca, http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/
Pages about Web authoring: http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/www.html

"Jukka K. Korpela" <jkor...@cs.tut.fi> wrote in message
news:Xns9314999E6810...@193.229.0.31...

They're certainly not in widespread use, however they are useful.
In the weblogging community there it is quite useful for the discovery of
permalinks to weblog entries. For example a typical front page weblog entry
on my site is follows the following format

<div class="blogitem">
<p>
<strong>
<a href="/archive/somemonth.html#link31st" title="permanent link"
rel="bookmark">31st:</a>
item title.</strong>
Some more text...</p>
</div>

with the archived version having a slightly different format.

<div class="blogitem" id="link31st">
etc...

This is useful for tools (such as trackback and rss scrapers) as they can
determine with a improved level of certainty where the blogentry is. I use
them in a program I wrote that automatically generates my RSS feed. The
origina for this idea can be seen in
Tantek Çelik's weblog entry,
http://tantek.com/log/2002/11.html#blog20021128t1352

So not completely useless, just mostly :)

regards,
--
BenM
http://www.benmeadowcroft.com