I sometimes mail draft blog posts around to select people for review.
In an experiment on openness and collaboration, I'm gonna try the
whole list this time. Apologies for the markup, which may be tough to
read. Any (constructive) comments welcome. If I hear nothing I'll
post it later tonight.
----
Title: Rel vs. Rev
<p>Another note in my very-neglected series on Semantic XHTML basics
<a href="http://www.microformats.org/blog/2005/10/19/more-than-
styling/">started awhile back</a>.</p>
<p>It seems that everytime I present microformats, I need to explain
the difference bettween the <a href="http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/
struct/links.html#adef-rel">rel</a> and <a href="http://www.w3.org/TR/
REC-html40/struct/links.html#adef-rev">rev</a> attributes. Its
understandable that most people don't grasp the difference, as I'm
sure most webdevelopers haven't needed to make use of these
semantics.</p>
<p>First of all, <code>rel</code> is an attribute which can be
applied to <code><a></code> and <code><link></code> to
define the relationship between the linked document and the current
one. So, a very common example is a link to a feed. This blog has:</p>
<pre><code><link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml"
title="RSS 2.0" href="http://www.microformats.org/feed/"; /></
code></pre>
<p>This can be read as <code>http://microformats.org/feed/</code> is
an <code>alternate</code> for <code>http://microformats.org/</code>
(Incidentally, the feed could link to this blog with
<code>rev="alternate"</code>, which would have <a href="http://
www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/struct/links.html#h-12.3.1">exactly the same
meaning</a>. More on <code>rev</code> in a minute.).</p>
<p><code>rel</code> is used by <a href="http://www.gmpg.org/
xfn/">XFN</a>, <a href="http://microformats.org/wiki/rel-tag";>rel-
tag</a>, <a href="http://microformats.org/wiki/rel-directory";>rel-
directory</a> and <a href="http://microformats.org/wiki/rel-
payment">rel-payment</a> microformats.</p>
<p>Now, <code>rev</code> is just like <code>rel</code>, but the
relationship is reversed (I think of rev as "reverse relationship").
It get used in the <a href="http://microformats.org/wiki/vote-
links">vote-links</a> microformat like this:</p>
<pre><code>
<a href="http://supr.c.ilio.us/blog/"; rev="vote-for" title="supr
snark">supr.c.ilio.us rocks!</a>
</code></pre>
<p>...which would be read as "<this document> is a vote-for
http://supr.c.ilio.us/blog/";.</p>
<p>rel and rev are useful for describing the relationships between
two resources on the web. Remember, it is only the relationship
between the documents, not the documents themselves which are
described.</p>
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