Re: [whatwg] Where did the rev attribute go?
I assume that you have too much current work to remember what you have written and why. You suggested that using class names as semantic attributes requires some central authority to publish a specification of the microformat in order that the robots are able to find out the meaning of the class names used. I disagreed because I think the meaning can be inferred from the names themselves. And no, this is not a request for a change. Cheers, Chris -Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Ian Hickson Sent: Thursday, August 09, 2007 1:23 AM To: Křištof Želechovski Cc: 'WHAT Working Group Mailing List' Subject: Re: [whatwg] Where did the rev attribute go? On Wed, 8 Aug 2007, Křištof Želechovski wrote: Automatic: class=A-N means A N. No spec needed. E.g.: class=red-herring means a red herring, and class=important-news means some important news. I don't understand this post; please let me know if it was requesting a change to the spec (ideally by explaining what is wrong with the spec that needs changing). Cheers, -- Ian Hickson
Re: [whatwg] Where did the rev attribute go?
On Wed, 8 Aug 2007, Křištof Želechovski wrote: Automatic: class=A-N means A N. No spec needed. E.g.: class=red-herring means a red herring, and class=important-news means some important news. I don't understand this post; please let me know if it was requesting a change to the spec (ideally by explaining what is wrong with the spec that needs changing). Cheers, -- Ian Hickson U+1047E)\._.,--,'``.fL http://ln.hixie.ch/ U+263A/, _.. \ _\ ;`._ ,. Things that are impossible just take longer. `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'
Re: [whatwg] Where did the rev attribute go?
This e-mail consists of replies to a few e-mails on the subject of links and link relationship types. No changes were made to the spec in response to these e-mails; if you reply, please indicate if you think something needs to change in the spec. Thanks! On Sat, 8 Jul 2006, Charles Iliya Krempeaux wrote: But, if the intent [of removing 'rev'] to really get rid of confusion then There's actually 2 things I noticed confuse people. #1: That the label you pick for the rel (or rev) needs to be a noun. (I do understand why... at least I think I do... so that you can use the same label in the class attribute. But it makes things difficult for some people.) As others noted, the label you should pick for rel should be taken from a specific set of labels defined in a specification (either HTML4, or HTML5, or a Microformat spec, or some other extension specification). So the noun aspect isn't a source of confusion as far as I can tell. It may be that people don't know you shouldn't just arbitrarily make up now names, though. #2: That rel (and rev) represent a relation between the two. Often people seem to want to classify what's at the end of the href. (Instead of specifying a relation.) Perhaps a new attribute is needed. Perhaps hrefclass. class on an a element can be used for this, IMHO. On Tue, 11 Jul 2006, Charles Iliya Krempeaux wrote: Let's say in a page, I have the following HTML code... li class=xoxo shows lia rel=show href=http://show.example.com/;Example IPTV Show/a/li lia rel=show href=http://show2.example.com/;Another Example IPTV Show/a/li /li The semantics here are The class-xoxo (on the li) says that I'm giving a list here. I assume you meant to use an ol on the outside, not an li. And in that case, it's the ol that says that you're giving a list, the xoxo class isn't necesarry to give the list semantic. And the class-shows says this thing is/has shows. (So basically, I'm listing shows.) This isn't a strong semantic (a random person who doesn't know you wouldn't necessarily know that's what your class meant), but it can be a convention you use within a particular community, sure. The rel-show inside the list of shows, says what's at the end of the href is a show for the list of shows. You could easily use class on the a element for this, without risking a clash with a future value introduced in (say) HTML6 for slideshow links. It would be as solid, semantically. If you wanted to go further, you'd have to define a specification for your rel or class show value. Your specification could then include the rest of your description: So,... if you go to the URL in the href, you get a whole HTML page with all sort of stuff in there. But what is the show? The whole page? Just part of it? Well, I then search the page for class-show. (I look for something inside the page with a class with the same token/name use in the rel that linked there.) If I find (just) one, then great, that's probably what I want to concentrate on. (The other parts of the page are probably irrelevent.) If not, I'll probably have to concentrate on the whole page. (This is the idea of opaque semantics that I was talking about before.) Does that clear it up? (This is what I imagined the developers of these things originally thought up.) I suggested hrefclass because we already have things like... lang and hreflang. It just seemed to follow the same style. (Since this seems to be just like the class attribute, expect we are applying it to what is at the end of the href... so hrefclass.) I don't really understand why you can't just apply it to the link itself (i.e. use class). On Tue, 11 Jul 2006, Charles Iliya Krempeaux wrote: Perhaps it's a poor example. But what I've gotten from the specs is that the rel attribute can be used in this way. Could you check the HTML5 spec and let me know if it can still be interpreted this way? For an example that's gained some popularity, look at hCard. http://microformats.org/wiki/hcard People wanted to semantically denote contact info. So they choose a set of class names to use (to do this) and some rules about them. Creating the standard is a somewhat arbitrury process. And requires humans to do it. Although with opaque semantics, like the rel name matching the class name, you don't need a human intervention to parse much of it. Does what I'm saying make sense? Or should I explain it more? I'm not convinced there's really a use case for making this automated to the level that you describe. It seems best to stick to having specifications for the cases that actually have uses. Alot of this is done for the benefit of machines (like browsers, spiders, search engines, etc). Right now, everything is done for the benefit of humans. The machines are just tools. But getting back to one things you said... it is NOT always the
Re: [whatwg] Where did the rev attribute go?
Charles Iliya Krempeaux wrote: On 7/11/06, Matthew Raymond [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: How about the element that has the ID that's in the URL in the |href| attribute? That would take you directly to the element in question. I think |xml:id| is pretty much a standard now. Yeah, that would definitely be better from a developer's point-of-view. And there are times when you do do that. But sometimes, you can't do that. Perhaps the HTML fragment that you want has no id on it. (And you have no control of the page [and] you can't add it.) How are you going to add the |class| attributes they leave out? By contrast, authoring software can be designed to automatically insert |id| attributes with auto-generated values if an |id| is not provided. Heck, part of the auto-generated value could be the element's |class| attribute value. Or, even if it does have it, perhaps linking to that fragment makes for poor usuability. And in terms of usability it's better to link to the page (without the fragment identifier -- without the id.) ( I.e., jumping to that part of the page would be bad from the usability point-of-view Or maybe doing so skips the ads on the page, and would mess up the business relation you have with that publishers.) So? You can do that now. What I'm saying is that [people] would choose their rel, rev, and class names ahead of time. And everyone would agree on them. And you'd have a (defacto) standard created. (A Microformat possibly.) Microformats don't really justify linking to a collection of elements via the |class| attribute. [Snip!] Creating the standard is a somewhat arbitrury process. And requires humans to do it. Although with opaque semantics, like the rel name matching the class name, you don't need a human intervention to parse much of it. Does what I'm saying make sense? Or should I explain it more? It doesn't make sense. Just because you have a link pointing to a class name doesn't mean that a user agent can figure out what the class name means. [Snipped the rest!] For the rest of your message, you seem to be talking about the general advantage of using the |class| attribute and microformats. I don't disagree that they have advantages, but I don't see how adding a special attribute containing class names from the target document actually helps anything, semantically or otherwise. If the idea is to add semantics, remember that the user agent still doesn't necessarily know what the class name is supposed to mean unless it's already part of an established microformat. If you're just trying to link to a collection of elements, it actually makes more sense to use an attribute that takes an XPath expression as a value.
Re: [whatwg] Where did the rev attribute go?
On Jul 13, 2006, at 2:57 AM, Robin Lionheart wrote:
...
Do the benefits of the computer having such knowledge outweigh the
cost of the human labor required to mark up names?
Good question. I expect many Web authors would not avail themselves of
the option of using name even if it were available.
...
Indeed, because it wouldn't offer them any presentational benefit
(except in the sort of gossip columns that have name {font-weight:
bold}).
Perhaps someone could ransack the W3C mailing list archives and find
out why all the new inline semantic elements in the HTML 3.0 draft
survived (with minor modifications) to HTML 4, *except for* person
and au[thor]. http://www.w3.org/MarkUp/html3/logical.html
--
Matthew Paul Thomas
http://mpt.net.nz/
Re: [whatwg] Where did the rev attribute go?
Hi, From: Matthew Raymond [EMAIL PROTECTED] If you're just trying to link to a collection of elements, it actually makes more sense to use an attribute that takes an XPath expression as a value. The XPointer xpointer() Scheme comes to mind. http://www.w3.org/TR/xptr-xpointer/ Regards, Simon Pieters
Re: [whatwg] Where did the rev attribute go?
(Surely there's a good reason CSS3 Speech has interpret-as: name and VoiceXML has interpret-as=name) The interpret-as property has been temporarily dropped until the Voice Browser working group has further progressed work on the SSML say-as element. ...says the latest CCS3 Speech WD. Thanks, seems I was a draft behind. I don't see interpret-as=name in VoiceXML 2.0 or 2.1. Perhaps the acceptable values of interpret-as are not as settled as http://www.vxml.org/say-as.htm?xt=1123294239864 led me to believe. Spell checkers work just fine without knowing what words are names. Well enough, though they could be improved. Thunderbird frequently informs me of spurious spelling errors on names in e-mails I send.
Re: [whatwg] Where did the rev attribute go?
On Jul 12, 2006, at 00:52, Charles Iliya Krempeaux wrote: Creating the standard is a somewhat arbitrury process. And requires humans to do it. Although with opaque semantics, like the rel name matching the class name, you don't need a human intervention to parse much of it. You don't need human intervention on a per-rel value basis in order to be able to extract rel values and stick them to a hash table or to compare values for equality. However, you do need specific programming by a human to process rel values in a way that takes takes into account the meaning (semantics) of a given rel value. The usual fallacy is that people assume that machines can't comprehend English prose but machines suddenly develop an understanding of English when nouns are put in element names or attribute values. Alot of this is done for the benefit of machines (like browsers, spiders, search engines, etc). It lets you add a bit of semantic salt to bring out the meaning in the HTML so that machines can understand the meaning of what you are saying too. Syntactic sugar causes cancer of the semicolon. I wouldn't be surprised is semantic salt was similarly unhealthy. :-) Anyway, asking what we could express is the wrong question. Expressing things is useless if there no one interested in listening to the expression or if the cost of expressing (and consuming the expression) is too high compared to the benefits. I wrote a kind of intro to this a while ago. I've had people (who able web developers but know nothing about semantic HTML) say that it's easy to read, so I'll refer you to that... http://changelog.ca/ log/2005/09/12/proposed-microformats-for-reputation-and-trust-metrics What music do my friends like to listen to? Can't you just ask them instead of requiring them to perform Semantic Web gymnastics so that they can be stalked using a search engine without actually talking with them? Who 'should' I be listening to about RSS? It could be entertaining (in a Jerry Springer way) to see people game the system on that one. :-) Now, not only does it know that Charles Iliya Krempeaux is a name. But it also knows that Charles is the person's given name. That Iliya is that person's additional name. And that Krempeaux is that person's family name. And then what? Why is it useful that a computer knows that a string on a Web page is a human name? Do the benefits of the computer having such knowledge outweigh the cost of the human labor required to mark up names? (If you really needed to figure out on a computer which strings are names, instead of requiring page authors to cooperate with you, you could get results by extracting clusters of capitalized words, matching them against a database of known first and last names and filling in the gaps by guessing. For example, you could guess that Krempeaux is a family name, because it is a capitalized word that follows two well-known given names.) -- Henri Sivonen [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://hsivonen.iki.fi/
Re: [whatwg] Where did the rev attribute go?
Henri Sivonen wrote: And then what? Why is it useful that a computer knows that a string on a Web page is a human name? Off the top of my head, a couple possible benefits of tagging proper names: * smarter search engines (nameBill Gates/name is not the words bill and gates. Could be beneficial to newspaper sites.) * speech synthesis (Surely there's a good reason CSS3 Speech has interpret-as: name and VoiceXML has interpret-as=name) * spell checking (Usable by Web page editing software) I expect the Semantic Web could work it into their encapsulation-of-knowledge schemes. Do the benefits of the computer having such knowledge outweigh the cost of the human labor required to mark up names? Good question. I expect many Web authors would not avail themselves of the option of using name even if it were available. (If you really needed to figure out on a computer which strings are names, instead of requiring page authors to cooperate with you, you could get results by extracting clusters of capitalized words, matching them against a database of known first and last names and filling in the gaps by guessing. For example, you could guess that Krempeaux is a family name, because it is a capitalized word that follows two well-known given names.) That probably wouldn't work better in running text than on a page of capitalized titles or headlines like Bush Administration Urges Congress to Ratify Detainee Treatment.
Re: [whatwg] Where did the rev attribute go?
Hello Matthew,On 7/11/06, Matthew Raymond [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Charles Iliya Krempeaux wrote: Hello Matthew, That clears things up a bit. But, if the intent is to really get rid of confusion thenThere's actually 2 things I noticed confuse people. #1: That the label you pick for the rel (or rev) needs to be a noun.(I do understand why... at least I think I do... so that you can use the same label in the class attribute.But it makes things difficult for some people.) I don't know what you mean about |class|, since it seems redundant.Furthermore, |rel| has predefined semantic value in HTML 4.01, whereas|class| has user-defined and/or proprietary semantic value at best. However, you are correct that it needs to be a noun, because it's the_name_ of a relationship.Perhaps I can illustrate what I mean with an example.(But first note that people can make up their own values for rel and rev. But anyways, here's the example.) Let's say in a page, I have the following HTML code...li class=xoxo shows lia rel=show href="" href="http://show.example.com/"> http://show.example.com/Example IPTV Show/a/li lia rel=show href="" href="http://show2.example.com/">http://show2.example.com/Another Example IPTV Show/a/li /liThe semantics here are The class-xoxo (on the li) says that I'm giving a list here. And the class-shows says this thing is/has shows. (So basically, I'm listing shows.) The rel-show inside the list of shows, says what's at the end of the href is a show for the list of shows.So,... if you go to the URL in the href, you get a whole HTML page with all sort of stuff in there. But what is the show? The whole page? Just part of it? Well, I then search the page for class-show. (I look for something inside the page with a class with the same token/name use in the rel that linked there.) If I find (just) one, then great, that's probably what I want to concentrate on. (The other parts of the page are probably irrelevent.) If not, I'll probably have to concentrate on the whole page.(This is the idea of opaque semantics that I was talking about before.) Does that clear it up?(This is what I imagined the developers of these things originally thought up.) #2: That rel (and rev) represent a relation between the two.Often people seem to want to classify what's at the end of the href. (Instead of specifying a relation.)Perhaps a new attribute is needed. Perhaps hrefclass. I would think something like linktype would be more appropriate.That said, |rel| is pretty much already corrupted to mean that, and ifwe introduced another attribute for the purpose of link types, it would either go unused for backwards compatibility reasons or it wouldsupplant both |rel| and |rev|.I suggested hrefclass because we already have things like... lang and hreflang. It just seemed to follow the same style. (Since this seems to be just like the class attribute, expect we are applying it to what is at the end of the href... so hrefclass.) See ya-- Charles Iliya Krempeaux, B.Sc.charles @ reptile.casupercanadian @ gmail.comdeveloper weblog: http://ChangeLog.ca/___ Make Television http://maketelevision.com/
Re: [whatwg] Where did the rev attribute go?
Charles Iliya Krempeaux wrote: Perhaps I can illustrate what I mean with an example. (But first note that people can make up their own values for rel and rev. But anyways, here's the example.) Let's say in a page, I have the following HTML code... li class=xoxo shows lia rel=show href= http://show.example.com/;Example IPTV Show/a/li lia rel=show href=http://show2.example.com/;Another Example IPTV Show/a/li /li (Not the best example, because show can be a verb.) The semantics here are The class-xoxo (on the li) says that I'm giving a list here. And the class-shows says this thing is/has shows. (So basically, I'm listing shows.) Wouldn't this be a lot like using |rel| to define a media type? Granted, it's more the example you're using than your general concept that's causing the confusion. The rel-show inside the list of shows, says what's at the end of the href is a show for the list of shows. So,... if you go to the URL in the href, you get a whole HTML page with all sort of stuff in there. But what is the show? The whole page? Just part of it? How about the element that has the ID that's in the URL in the |href| attribute? That would take you directly to the element in question. I think |xml:id| is pretty much a standard now. Well, I then search the page for [class show]. (I look for something inside the page with a class with the same token/name use in the rel that linked there.) What if the web page you're linking to has the class name JoeMunchey instead of show? You're requiring people to examine the HTML of the target page in order to use this feature. The |rel| attribute doesn't have this requirement; you need only to know what the nature of the target page is. If I find (just) one, then great, that's probably what I want to concentrate on. (The other parts of the page are probably [irrelevant].) If not, I'll probably have to concentrate on the whole page. (This is the idea of opaque semantics that I was talking about before.) Does that clear it up? It seems like some sort of a link-to-class, rather than linking to a URL + ID. I don't see the point. How is anyone going to see this on their browser? Will it open multiple tabs? I'm not thrilled about giving authors the ability to open multiple tabs or windows in my browser without my consent. Will it create a drop-down that lists all the elements that are part of the class? This will not give me any contextual information from the page that may help me figure out which element I want to look at. In fact, if I were creating a page about various shows, most if not all of the information on the page would be contextual or supporting information for the shows contained within. Sorry, but I just don't see the use case. I would think something like linktype would be more appropriate. That said, |rel| is pretty much already corrupted to mean that, and if we introduced another attribute for the purpose of link types, it would either go unused for backwards compatibility reasons or it would supplant both |rel| and |rev|. I suggested hrefclass because we already have things like... lang and hreflang. It just seemed to follow the same style. (Since this seems to be just like the class attribute, expect we are applying it to what is at the end of the href... so hrefclass.) That would be more appropriate for what you've described above. I just don't see the point of it.
Re: [whatwg] Where did the rev attribute go?
Hello Matthew,On 7/11/06, Matthew Raymond [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Charles Iliya Krempeaux wrote: Perhaps I can illustrate what I mean with an example. (But first note that people can make up their own values for rel and rev.But anyways, here's the example.) Let's say in a page, I have the following HTML code... li class=xoxo shows lia rel=show href="" http://show.example.com/Example IPTV Show/a/li lia rel=show href="" href="http://show2.example.com/">http://show2.example.com/Another Example IPTV Show/a/li /li (Not the best example, because show can be a verb.) The semantics here areThe class-xoxo (on the li) says that I'm giving a list here.And the class-shows says this thing is/has shows.(So basically, I'm listing shows.) Wouldn't this be a lot like using |rel| to define a media type?Granted, it's more the example you're using than your general concept that's causing the confusion.Perhaps it's a poor example. But what I've gotten from the specs is that the rel attribute can be used in this way. The rel-show inside the list of shows, says what's at the end of the href is a show for the list of shows. So,... if you go to the URL in the href, you get a whole HTML page with all sort of stuff in there.But what is the show?The whole page?Just part of it? How about the element that has the ID that's in the URL in the |href|attribute? That would take you directly to the element in question. I think |xml:id| is pretty much a standard now.Yeah, that would definitely be better from a developer's point-of-view. And there are times when you do do that.But sometimes, you can't do that. Perhaps the HTML fragment that you want has no id on it. (And you have no control of the page any you can't add it.)Or, even if it does have it, perhaps linking to that fragment makes for poor usuability. And in terms of usability it's better to link to the page (without the fragment identifier -- without the id.) ( I.e., jumping to that part of the page would be bad from the usability point-of-view Or maybe doing so skips the ads on the page, and would mess up the business relation you have with that publishers.) Or perhaps the thing you want there is spread out into multiple HTML fragments on the page. (I show an exampe of this later on in this e-mail.) Well, I then search the page for [class show].(I look for something inside the page with a class with the same token/name use in the rel that linked there.) What if the web page you're linking to has the class name JoeMunchey instead of show? You're requiring people to examine theHTML of the target page in order to use this feature. The |rel|attribute doesn't have this requirement; you need only to know what the nature of the target page is.What I'm saying is that peolpe would choose their rel, rev, and class names ahead of time. And everyone would agree on them. And you'd have a (defacto) standard created. (A Microformat possibly.)So that people who made a show (would be aware of the standard ahead of time and) would mark up their pages with the class-show. (And anything else the standard required or asked for.) And people would make their list of shows with rel-show point to each show in their list.But,... people would agree on these ahead of time.For an example that's gained some popularity, look at hCard. http://microformats.org/wiki/hcardPeople wanted to semantically denote contact info. So they choose a set of class names to use (to do this) and some rules about them. Creating the standard is a somewhat arbitrury process. And requires humans to do it.Although with opaque semantics, like the rel name matching the class name, you don't need a human intervention to parse much of it. Does what I'm saying make sense? Or should I explain it more? If I find (just) one, then great, that's probably what I want to concentrate on.(The other parts of the page are probably [irrelevant].) If not, I'll probably have to concentrate on the whole page. (This is the idea of opaque semantics that I was talking about before.) Does that clear it up? It seems like some sort of a link-to-class, rather than linking to aURL + ID. I don't see the point. How is anyone going to see this ontheir browser? Will it open multiple tabs? I'm not thrilled about giving authors the ability to open multiple tabs or windows in my browserwithout my consent. Will it create a drop-down that lists all theelements that are part of the class? This will not give me anycontextual information from the page that may help me figure out which element I want to look at. In fact, if I were creating a page aboutvarious shows, most if not all of the information on the page would becontextual or supporting information for the shows contained within. Sorry, but I just don't see the use case.Alot of this is done for the benefit of machines (like browsers, spiders, search engines, etc).It lets you add a bit of semantic salt to bring out the meaning in the HTML so that machines can understand the meaning of what you are
Re: [whatwg] Where did the rev attribute go?
Hello Matthew,That clears things up a bit.But, if the intent is to really get rid of confusion then There's actually 2 things I noticed confuse people.#1: That the label you pick for the rel (or rev) needs to be a noun. (I do understand why... at least I think I do... so that you can use the same label in the class attribute. But it makes things difficult for some people.) #2: That rel (and rev) represent a relation between the two. Often people seem to want to classify what's at the end of the href. (Instead of specifying a relation.) Perhaps a new attribute is needed. Perhaps hrefclass. See yaOn 7/8/06, Matthew Raymond [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: You make the argument that people might be using |rev| intentionallyfor some values and the the statistical method used by Goggle doesn'tmake that determination. Let's look at the two most common uses. If you look at |rev=made|, the most common use of |rev|, it's pretty clear that the use is intentional. However, |rev=made| ispretty much equivalent to |rel=author|, which is nearly as common, sothe impact of eliminating |rev=made| is minimal. If you look at the following link, note that |rev=made| is the only use of |rev|mentioned, by the way:http://www.htmlhelp.com/reference/wilbur/head/link.html The second most common usage is |rev=stylesheet|. Since CSS stylesheets don't use HTML, let alone a and link, we can safely assumethat this is, in fact, either the result of confusion by the author or a spelling type, and as you pointed out, a typo is unlikely. This reallydoes suggest a genuine problem with people not understanding thedifference between |rel| and |rev|, since |rel=stylesheet| is the most common use of |rel|. I really wish we could see more data on that, though. One of the problems with |rev| is that it's supposed to share valueswith |rel|, but in reality many of these values are either have narrow use cases for |rev| or are completely unusable, such as stylesheet andicon. In my estimation, this will eventually result in a proliferationof values that favor a specific value. In fact, that's what we've seen, since most values are |rel|-centric.Charles Iliya Krempeaux wrote: For example, I tend to use rev-author, rev-comment, and rev-tag quite [a lot]. These aren't typos; these are intentional. And I do understand what each means and am using them properly. None of the values you mention are defined in HTML 4.01, andconsidering you are the one asking for |rev| to be included in HTML 5,I don't think you can consider yourself a typical author. -- Charles Iliya Krempeaux, B.Sc.charles @ reptile.ca supercanadian @ gmail.com developer weblog: http://ChangeLog.ca/ ___Make Television http://maketelevision.com/
Re: [whatwg] Where did the rev attribute go?
You make the argument that people might be using |rev| intentionally for some values and the the statistical method used by Goggle doesn't make that determination. Let's look at the two most common uses. If you look at |rev=made|, the most common use of |rev|, it's pretty clear that the use is intentional. However, |rev=made| is pretty much equivalent to |rel=author|, which is nearly as common, so the impact of eliminating |rev=made| is minimal. If you look at the following link, note that |rev=made| is the only use of |rev| mentioned, by the way: http://www.htmlhelp.com/reference/wilbur/head/link.html The second most common usage is |rev=stylesheet|. Since CSS style sheets don't use HTML, let alone a and link, we can safely assume that this is, in fact, either the result of confusion by the author or a spelling type, and as you pointed out, a typo is unlikely. This really does suggest a genuine problem with people not understanding the difference between |rel| and |rev|, since |rel=stylesheet| is the most common use of |rel|. I really wish we could see more data on that, though. One of the problems with |rev| is that it's supposed to share values with |rel|, but in reality many of these values are either have narrow use cases for |rev| or are completely unusable, such as stylesheet and icon. In my estimation, this will eventually result in a proliferation of values that favor a specific value. In fact, that's what we've seen, since most values are |rel|-centric. Charles Iliya Krempeaux wrote: For example, I tend to use rev-author, rev-comment, and rev-tag quite [a lot]. These aren't typos; these are intentional. And I do understand what each means and am using them properly. None of the values you mention are defined in HTML 4.01, and considering you are the one asking for |rev| to be included in HTML 5, I don't think you can consider yourself a typical author.
Re: [whatwg] Where did the rev attribute go?
Hello,On 7/5/06, Ian Hickson [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On Thu, 6 Jul 2006, Tore Eriksson wrote:[...] As for myself, I use the rev attribute in an internal project (sorry, no link) at work. I have to agree with Charles/Iliya that the recognition of rev is probably going up in the future if the adaption of new microformats continues.It certainly can't go down. :-) On the contrary, I would argue that we should get rid of it as fast as possible, so that we don't scare away authors who are becoming semantically minded by making the language more complicated than absolutely necessary. I have to disagree here. Removing the complexity in the HTML specification just moves it to the semantic application where the semantically minded users have to agree on what the corresponding inverse relations are. In my opinion the HTML spec is the place where this distinction can be kept with the least amount of interfering complexity. As your survey shows, there is not a lot of confusion about rev, just some people having problems with spelling the rel attribute. I think there would probably have been a lot of herf attributes out there if they were not discovered as easily as they are.The point is not just that people mis-use the rev attribute; the point is that with the exception of a single value (made), people *typo the revattribute more often than they intentionally use it*.It's difficult for me to see how they could typo it. The L key and the V key on my keyboard at least aren't anywhere near each other. (It would suggest to me that if they wrote rev instead of rel, then they either meant it or they don't understand the difference.) What makes you so sure they are making spelling mistakes? Or that they didn't actually mean it and aren't using it properly?For example, I tend to use rev-author, rev-comment, and rev-tag quite alot. These aren't typos; these are intentional. And I do understand what each means and am using them properly. Is the system that generated that report able to know that I use them properly? Or did it just assume that they must have been mistakes? Another interesting statistic: people use rel=made once for every 2.2instances of rev=made.(Sorry if this is in that report you referred us to, but I didn't notice it) How do you know that those usages of rev-made or rel-made were mistakes? How do you know that they weren't intentional and weren't accurate?Was the system that generated the report able to figure out which ones were good and which ones were bad? That is *far* more frequent a mistake than othertypos (the script langauge= typo, which is so common that it appeared in the top-1000 attributes, is only made once for every 833 uses of thecorrect one -- and that's another example, just like rel/rev, where makingthe typo causes no ill effects in browsers, so it is equivalent IMHO). This, to me, suggests that in fact what you call a simple typo is not justa typo, to me it seems to really be author confusion.Again, what makes you so certain that the author was confused, and didn't really mean to assert rev-made or rel-made? I guess my question is Did the analysis that generated that report just assume that any rev for a label that is usually asserted in a rel is a typo or confusion by the author? And that any rel for a label that is usually asserted in a rev is a typo or confusion by the author too? [...] Just for reference, what was the usage of the hreflang and media attribute in anchor tags? At what usage level do you feel it is apropriate to compromise backward compability by removing an attribute?Removing those attributes wouldn't affect backwards compatibility. a hreflang= was used about as much as a location.href="" hraligh=, and td heigth= (around 800th in the chart of top-1000attributes in the sample). a media= didn't register. link hreflang= came in at around 950th, link media= came in at around142nd (stylesheets mean this attribute is oft-used).hreflang= and media= don't seem to cause any author damage. They provide a useful hook that can't be done any other way. Thus they seempotentially valuable and don't have a high associated cost.Thanks for adding media to the a element BTW. (I'm finding it useful already in distinguishing RSS and Atom feeds meant for different purposes.) See ya-- Charles Iliya Krempeaux, B.Sc.charles @ reptile.ca supercanadian @ gmail.com developer weblog: http://ChangeLog.ca/ ___Make Television http://maketelevision.com/
Re: [whatwg] Where did the rev attribute go?
On 7/5/06, Ian Hickson [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: (This data is based on a crawl of approximately one billion documents.) Could you give us some pointers to this software? Could you give us pointers to that data? -- Hugh Winkler Wellstorm Development http://www.wellstorm.com/ +1 512 694 4795 mobile (preferred) +1 512 264 3998 office
Re: [whatwg] Where did the rev attribute go?
On Thu, 6 Jul 2006, Hugh Winkler wrote: On 7/5/06, Ian Hickson [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: (This data is based on a crawl of approximately one billion documents.) Could you give us some pointers to this software? Could you give us pointers to that data? http://code.google.com/webstats/index.html -- Ian Hickson U+1047E)\._.,--,'``.fL http://ln.hixie.ch/ U+263A/, _.. \ _\ ;`._ ,. Things that are impossible just take longer. `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'
[whatwg] Where did the rev attribute go?
Hello,(I didn't search the archive extensively to see if this came up before, but)What happened to the rev attribute?Neither the a or link element seems to have it anymore... http://whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/#the-linkhttp://whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/#the-aThe rev attribute is important for allowing what I call opaque semantics. With opaque semantics, software can form a graph of relations without needing to understand what the labels (used in the rel, rev, and class attributes) actually mean. They just connect the dots, so to speak, based on matching labels. See ya-- Charles Iliya Krempeaux, B.Sc. charles @ reptile.ca supercanadian @ gmail.com developer weblog: http://ChangeLog.ca/___ Make Televisionhttp://maketelevision.com/
Re: [whatwg] Where did the rev attribute go?
Charles Iliya Krempeaux wrote: What happened to the rev attribute? The problem with the rev attribute is that it's difficult for authors to understand the concept of a reverse link relationship; and compared with rel, it's hardly ever used. There's only one use of rev that I'm aware of which is listed on microformats.org. It's for vote-links, but I don't think those relationships should be used anyway. Neither the a or link element seems to have it anymore... I think it should still be present, but it's semantics would need to be clarified and explained. We should probably also identify some real use cases where it is actually useful for authors. The rev attribute is important for allowing what I call opaque semantics. Can you more clearly define what you mean by opaque semantics? -- Lachlan Hunt http://lachy.id.au/
Re: [whatwg] Where did the rev attribute go?
On Wed, 5 Jul 2006, Charles Iliya Krempeaux wrote: What happened to the rev attribute? It got removed. For the reasoning see: http://code.google.com/webstats/2005-12/linkrels.html Basically, nearly nobody was using it, and almost all those that were were using it incorrectly. This indicates that there is a problem. In practice it's no big deal. For every rev= value you can find or define an equivalent rel= value. -- Ian Hickson U+1047E)\._.,--,'``.fL http://ln.hixie.ch/ U+263A/, _.. \ _\ ;`._ ,. Things that are impossible just take longer. `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'
Re: [whatwg] Where did the rev attribute go?
Hello Lachlan,On 7/5/06, Lachlan Hunt [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Charles Iliya Krempeaux wrote: What happened to the rev attribute?The problem with the rev attribute is that it's difficult for authors tounderstand the concept of a reverse link relationship; and compared with rel, it's hardly ever used.There's only one use of rev that I'm aware of which is listed onmicroformats.org.It's for vote-links, but I don't think thoserelationships should be used anyway. It would be a shame to get rid of it now, now that web developers are starting to become semantically minded.Sure no one is using it that much right now. But developers seemed to only recently awaken to the idea of adding semantics into HTML. (And it seems to be catching on more and more.) As developers start building semantics into web technologies, their going find that they need the rev attribute. (Not sure if that would be enough justification here to keep it. But since we already have it, it would be nice to keep it.) For example, I'm interested in trust metrics and reputation, so I consider a rel and rev to work hand-in-hand to establish this.For a real life example, consider these community marks people have been talking about. People want to essentially say someone is a member of a group. Let's use the Microformats.org group for example. Well, if I wanted to claim that I'm a member of that group, then I could put a Microformats badge on my blog, and link it to the Microformats.org website.But, being semantically minded, I'd link it like this:a rev=member href="" http://microformats.org/ img src="" href="http://microformats.org/image/badge.png">http://microformats.org/image/badge.png alt= Microformats.org //a(Note the rev-member.)Now that's great and all, but anyone can put a badge like that on their site. How do you know you can trust that?Well, what if the Microformats.org website had a members page, and linked to all their members, including my blog with the following: a rel=member href="" href="http://changelog.ca/">http://changelog.ca/ Charles Iliya Krempeaux /a (Note that we are using rel here, instead of rev like before. Also note that the exact same label was using -- member.)Well then we'd know that we trust this relation, because we have the same relation being asserted both ways. (Or at least can trust it more than if only one page was asserting the relation.) Without the rev, we could still do this with rel however, the exact same label could NOT be used. And then any kind of system to analyse this would have to understand what this labels actually meant and know what the reverse relation name was. That is essentially my personal reason for wanting rev. So that the exact same label can be used no matter what the direction of the relation. (That way a generic parser and query engine can be written for this type of stuff, even if the system does NOT understand the meaning of the labels.) Neither the a or link element seems to have it anymore... I think it should still be present, but it's semantics would need to beclarified and explained.We should probably also identify some real usecases where it is actually useful for authors. I'm using it for trust metrics and reputation. (But that's just me and the software I write :-) ) The rev attribute is important for allowing what I call opaque semantics.Can you more clearly define what you mean by opaque semantics?Think about XML (as compared to SGML-based HTML). One of the design goals for it was to make it so that a generic parser could be written for it without knowing anything about the meaning of the elements/tags. This was accomplished by requiring lone elements -- elements without a closing tag -- to have a trailing slash. So, for example, you would NOT write br or hr; but you would write br / and hr /. This meant that the semantics of the elements/tags could be opaque. A generic XML parser didn't need to know that a br element did NOT have an ending tag.In fact, anyone can create their own custom XML-based language, and any XML parser will be able to handle it properly. In the same way, I'd like to keep this kind of advantage with typed links. (I.e., keep this kind of advantage with linked that use rel and rev.)Analysing all these typed links (spread out across the web), you can create a graph connecting URI's. And the edges of the graph would have these labels and which side of the URI asserted the relation. With the rev attribute, the exact same label can be used. The semantics of the label can be opaque, but the system for analysing all this will work anyways.So, for example,... if the page http://z.example.com/ had links like the following:a rel=aaa href="" href="http://a.example.com/"> http://a.example.com/.../aa rel=bbb href="" href="http://b.example.com/">http://b.example.com/.../a a rel=ccc href="" href="http://c.example.com/">http://c.example.com/.../aAnd the page http://a.example.com/ had links like the following:a rev=aaa href=""
Re: [whatwg] Where did the rev attribute go?
On Wed, 5 Jul 2006, Charles Iliya Krempeaux wrote: It would be a shame to get rid of it now, now that web developers are starting to become semantically minded. On the contrary, I would argue that we should get rid of it as fast as possible, so that we don't scare away authors who are becoming semantically minded by making the language more complicated than absolutely necessary. As developers start building semantics into web technologies, their going find that they need the rev attribute. (Not sure if that would be enough justification here to keep it. But since we already have it, it would be nice to keep it.) For HTML5 the assumption is that we're removing everything unless we can put forward a convincing argument to keep it. What are the use cases for rev? Do they outweigh the author cost? Without the rev, we could still do this with rel however, the exact same label could NOT be used. And then any kind of system to analyse this would have to understand what this labels actually meant and know what the reverse relation name was. It would seem to me like that's the case anyway, for any practical application. Other than the software you have mentioned, I have never even heard of any generic-purpose parsers for this kind of stuff -- and if such a parser was going to be useful, you'd think that in the 16 or so years since HTML was invented, someone would have made one and people would be using it. That is essentially my personal reason for wanting rev. So that the exact same label can be used no matter what the direction of the relation. (That way a generic parser and query engine can be written for this type of stuff, even if the system does NOT understand the meaning of the labels.) While I understand what you're saying, it seems highly theoretical. Data on authoring practice shows that authors simply don't understand rev=: the top five link rev= were made, stylesheet, owns, author, and owner. rev=made is the only one of those where rev= wasn't a typo for rel=. Usage of a rev= was so low that even the height attribute on the space element is used more often, according to the data I have. And the space element doesn't even exist! In contrast, the a rel= attribute was used more than 60 times more often than the space height=. (I use space height= as the example here because that's the least-used attribute that I actually recorded data for; a rev= is used so rarely that it didn't even appear on my top-1000 attributes list. I have data regarding a rev= values because I specifically recordeded rel/rev data in the study, to determine whether or not we should keep rev=.) (This data is based on a crawl of approximately one billion documents.) I'm using it for trust metrics and reputation. (But that's just me and the software I write :-) ) Could you give us some pointers to this software? -- Ian Hickson U+1047E)\._.,--,'``.fL http://ln.hixie.ch/ U+263A/, _.. \ _\ ;`._ ,. Things that are impossible just take longer. `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'
Re: [whatwg] Where did the rev attribute go?
Hello everybody. Regarding usage of rev, I would like to point out the RDF/A proposal http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/BestPractices/HTML/2005-rdfa-syntax.html where they use rev to incorporate RDF into (X)HTML documents. As for myself, I use the rev attribute in an internal project (sorry, no link) at work. I have to agree with Charles/Iliya that the recognition of rev is probably going up in the future if the adaption of new microformats continues. Ian Hickson wrote: On Wed, 5 Jul 2006, Charles Iliya Krempeaux wrote: It would be a shame to get rid of it now, now that web developers are starting to become semantically minded. On the contrary, I would argue that we should get rid of it as fast as possible, so that we don't scare away authors who are becoming semantically minded by making the language more complicated than absolutely necessary. I have to disagree here. Removing the complexity in the HTML specification just moves it to the semantic application where the semantically minded users have to agree on what the corresponding inverse relations are. In my opinion the HTML spec is the place where this distinction can be kept with the least amount of interfering complexity. As your survey shows, there is not a lot of confusion about rev, just some people having problems with spelling the rel attribute. I think there would probably have been a lot of herf attributes out there if they were not discovered as easily as they are. As developers start building semantics into web technologies, their going find that they need the rev attribute. (Not sure if that would be enough justification here to keep it. But since we already have it, it would be nice to keep it.) For HTML5 the assumption is that we're removing everything unless we can put forward a convincing argument to keep it. What are the use cases for rev? Do they outweigh the author cost? See RDF/A. What is actually the author cost in keeping the rev attribute? Wouldn't you say that there is a cost in removing it as well? And removing it also contradicts the statement care has been taken to ensure that backwards-compatibility is retained in the draft (1.3.) That is essentially my personal reason for wanting rev. So that the exact same label can be used no matter what the direction of the relation. (That way a generic parser and query engine can be written for this type of stuff, even if the system does NOT understand the meaning of the labels.) And there might be cases when the relationship is different in the two directions. I just have to come up with some convincing example... While I understand what you're saying, it seems highly theoretical. Data on authoring practice shows that authors simply don't understand rev=: the top five link rev= were made, stylesheet, owns, author, and owner. rev=made is the only one of those where rev= wasn't a typo for rel=. Usage of a rev= was so low that even the height attribute on the space element is used more often, according to the data I have. And the space element doesn't even exist! In contrast, the a rel= attribute was used more than 60 times more often than the space height=. (I use space height= as the example here because that's the least-used attribute that I actually recorded data for; a rev= is used so rarely that it didn't even appear on my top-1000 attributes list. I have data regarding a rev= values because I specifically recordeded rel/rev data in the study, to determine whether or not we should keep rev=.) Just for reference, what was the usage of the hreflang and media attribute in anchor tags? At what usage level do you feel it is apropriate to compromise backward compability by removing an attribute? Regards Tore ___ Tore Eriksson [tore.eriksson ad po.rd.taisho.co.jp]
Re: [whatwg] Where did the rev attribute go?
On Thu, 6 Jul 2006, Tore Eriksson wrote: Regarding usage of rev, I would like to point out the RDF/A proposal http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/BestPractices/HTML/2005-rdfa-syntax.html where they use rev to incorporate RDF into (X)HTML documents. RDF/A is an utter disaster and not a valid use case for anything. For a more detailed comment on RDF/a, see: http://microformats.org/discuss/mail/microformats-discuss/2006-May/004144.html As for myself, I use the rev attribute in an internal project (sorry, no link) at work. I have to agree with Charles/Iliya that the recognition of rev is probably going up in the future if the adaption of new microformats continues. It certainly can't go down. On the contrary, I would argue that we should get rid of it as fast as possible, so that we don't scare away authors who are becoming semantically minded by making the language more complicated than absolutely necessary. I have to disagree here. Removing the complexity in the HTML specification just moves it to the semantic application where the semantically minded users have to agree on what the corresponding inverse relations are. In my opinion the HTML spec is the place where this distinction can be kept with the least amount of interfering complexity. As your survey shows, there is not a lot of confusion about rev, just some people having problems with spelling the rel attribute. I think there would probably have been a lot of herf attributes out there if they were not discovered as easily as they are. The point is not just that people mis-use the rev attribute; the point is that with the exception of a single value (made), people *typo the rev attribute more often than they intentionally use it*. Another interesting statistic: people use rel=made once for every 2.2 instances of rev=made. That is *far* more frequent a mistake than other typos (the script langauge= typo, which is so common that it appeared in the top-1000 attributes, is only made once for every 833 uses of the correct one -- and that's another example, just like rel/rev, where making the typo causes no ill effects in browsers, so it is equivalent IMHO). This, to me, suggests that in fact what you call a simple typo is not just a typo, to me it seems to really be author confusion. As developers start building semantics into web technologies, their going find that they need the rev attribute. (Not sure if that would be enough justification here to keep it. But since we already have it, it would be nice to keep it.) For HTML5 the assumption is that we're removing everything unless we can put forward a convincing argument to keep it. What are the use cases for rev? Do they outweigh the author cost? See RDF/A. See above. RDF/a is not a use case. What is actually the author cost in keeping the rev attribute? See above. One mistake for every 2.2 correct uses. Wouldn't you say that there is a cost in removing it as well? Not a significant one. The rev attribute is almost never used. Almost all uses are actually rev=made, which is a non-issue (it is trivially replaced by rel=author and we can grandfather that usage in if there is a tool that requires that information, for back-compat). And removing it also contradicts the statement care has been taken to ensure that backwards-compatibility is retained in the draft (1.3.) Preventing future documents from using this attribute does not break backwards compatibility. Just for reference, what was the usage of the hreflang and media attribute in anchor tags? At what usage level do you feel it is apropriate to compromise backward compability by removing an attribute? Removing those attributes wouldn't affect backwards compatibility. a hreflang= was used about as much as a location.href=, hr aligh=, and td heigth= (around 800th in the chart of top-1000 attributes in the sample). a media= didn't register. link hreflang= came in at around 950th, link media= came in at around 142nd (stylesheets mean this attribute is oft-used). hreflang= and media= don't seem to cause any author damage. They provide a useful hook that can't be done any other way. Thus they seem potentially valuable and don't have a high associated cost. -- Ian Hickson U+1047E)\._.,--,'``.fL http://ln.hixie.ch/ U+263A/, _.. \ _\ ;`._ ,. Things that are impossible just take longer. `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'
