On 3 May 2010, at 8:42 PM, Joseph Becher wrote:
On http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/struct/links.html#h-12.3 it states
that the rev attribute should be used for reverse links, but on that
page and others I observed that you use the rel attribute for the
'Previous' link. Is there a reason for this?
Hi Joseph,
I think this is the explanation:
Chapter 2 has a "previous" chapter (Chapter 1). Thus, from the
perspective of Chapter 2, I want to specify the "previous"
relationship (rel) to Chapter 1. In Chapter 2 I write:
<link href="Chapter1" rel="prev"/>
Suppose I also wanted to say within Chapter 1 that Chapter 1 is the
previous chapter of Chapter 2. I could write this in Chapter 1:
<link href="Chapter2" rev="prev"/>
I used the "prev" relationship, but you could do this with another
link type [1]. For instance, from the cover page:
<link href="copyright.html" rel="copyright"/>
and from copyright.html, to say "I am the copyright statement of the
cover page," you could say:
<link href="cover.html" rev="copyright"/>
That, at least, is my understanding: rel and rev allow you to describe
a relationship and its inverse. A search around the Web suggests that
rev is not used much. I believe HTML5 deprecates it [2].
_ Ian
[1] http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/types.html#type-links
[2] http://www.w3.org/TR/html5/obsolete.html
--
Ian Jacobs ([email protected]) http://www.w3.org/People/Jacobs/
Tel: +1 718 260 9447
