Hello Ian
Ian Hickson wrote:
On Tue, 18 Nov 2008, Martin McEvoy wrote:
Just one small question
Why Has HTML5 dropped the rev=""[1] attribute?
[1] http://www.w3.org/TR/html5-diff/#absent-attributes
We did some studies and found that the attribute was almost never used,
and most of the time, when it was used, it was a typo where someone meant
to write rel="" but wrote rev="". To be precise, the most commonly used
value was rev="made", which is equivalent to rel="author" and thus was not
a convincing use case.
!! rel-author doesn't mean the same as rev-made eg:
"I have just finished this new <a rel="author"
href="http://coolsite.co.uk/";>Cool website</a> check it out""
that would mean <http://coolsite.co.uk/> is the author of the referring
page which is nonsense. rev="author" is clearly better semantics in the
above case?
The second most common value was rev="stylesheet",
which is meaningless and obviously meant to be rel="stylesheet".
And that was the basis of the whatwg decision to drop rev? (I am not
criticizing just trying to understand it) surely all it needed was to
define some rev values (the same as rel) and people will start using rev
correctly?
We
therefore determined that authors would benefit more from the validator
complaining about this attribute instead of supporting it.
Anything that could be done with rev="" can be done with rel="" with an
opposite keyword, so this omission should be easy to handle.
There are some cases where that is just not possible.
Cheers,
Thanks
--
Martin McEvoy
http://weborganics.co.uk/
