Sjoerd Visscher wrote: > Nikolas 'Atrus' Coukouma wrote: > >> Sjoerd Visscher wrote: >> >>> Why not support hyperlinks too? >>> >>> So besides: >>> >>> <link rel="alternate" type="application/atom+xml" title="Main Atom >>> feed" href="/xml/index.atom"> >>> >>> also: >>> >>> <a rel="alternate" type="application/atom+xml" >>> href="/xml/index.atom">Main Atom feed</a> >>> >>> Most webpages already have a hyperlink to the feed, so they'd only >>> need to add two attributes. It would be a waste to have to duplicate >>> the information in the document head. >>> >> >> The intent of the head element is to indicate a feed that serves as a >> substitute for the page you're currently viewing. >> >> This other case is locating all feeds linked to from a page. For that, >> the type attribute should be sufficient to indicate that you're linking >> to a feed. > > > No, a hyperlink with a rel attribute means the same as a link element. > The HTML spec describes the rel attribute on the a element thus: > > This attribute describes the relationship from the current document to > the anchor specified by the href attribute. The value of this > attribute is a space-separated list of link types.
What I was getting at is that link elements in the head are usually a kind of metadata intended for the user agent. Hyperlinks are usually meant to be displayed. This proposal is aimed at providing metadata for the user agent, so it makes since to put it in a link element in the head. I'm on the fence about whether or not a link element should be the *required*, even when a hyperlink is present in the body. Supporting general hyperlinks starts making more sense if we have cases other than alternate (I've written elsewhere about this) because the amount of duplicated information is much greater. If you're only supporting feeds that serve as an alternate form of the content, then it makes sense to repeat one link once just to make the programmer stuck writing the user agent. I'd hope that whatever library/toolkit they're using supports XPath queries. Using them makes it easy to pluck out anything with type="application/atom+xml" and an href property. It's worth noting that in recent versions of XHTML, anything with an href property is a hyperlink. There's no requirement to use an anchor or an xlink:link element. -Nikolas 'Atrus' Coukouma
