Tse Shing Chi (Franklin/Whale) wrote:
However, since the Web Applications draft already covers all of
these issues fairly well, I believe it is unnecessary for this
draft to be resurrected. Instead, a few of the good ideas from
this draft should be integrated into the WA1 spec.
Web Applications 1.0 is new markup language based on HTML under
development. UAs that support feed autodiscovery are not necessary to
support Web Apps 1.0. Relying on the definitions in the specification
of Web Apps 1.0 is not appropriate.
They don't need to support it fully, UAs can just implement the parts
they need. The relationships can still be defined within it, just like
many were defined in HTML4.
The reason of using "alternate" is that, "alternate" was already
defined the HTML 4.01 Specificiation and it is widely used by UAs. [
http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/types.html#type-links ]
I'm aware of the reason for choosing alternate originally and I accept
that it needs to be supported like that for backwards compatibility, but
that doesn't mean we can't fix the mistake.
"Authors may wish to define additional link types not described in
this specification. If they do so, they should use a profile to cite
the conventions used to define the link types. Please see the profile
attribute of the HEAD element for more details."
The profile attribute isn't used in reality. Authors rarely set it, or
it's set by their CMS to some default value and they don't bother to
change it. Many of the tools that implement microformats don't even
bother to check for the presence of the correct profile attribute, they
just look for the values of the rel and class attributes. The profile
attribute will most likely be dropped from HTML5.
On the other hand, the W3C Widgets 1.0 autodiscovery is also using
"alternate". [ http://www.w3.org/TR/widgets/#autodiscovery ]
That's currently a first working draft and I think that's a mistake,
rel="alternate" is not designed as a relationship for everything, it was
designed for the specific purpose of linking to alternative
representations. In the case of feeds, it sort of fits the definition,
though not completely, but it certainly doesn't in the case of a widget.
They should instead define something like rel="widget" because a
widget is not necessarily an alternate representation of a document.
I think that only <link> should be used. All feeds linked by <a>
should be ignored during the process of autodiscovery.
Why?
--
Lachlan Hunt
http://lachy.id.au/
