Re: REL and REV attributes (Was: More comments on HTML 3.0)

Brian Behlendorf (brian@organic.com)
Thu, 27 Apr 95 16:04:14 EDT

My vote goes for keeping REL and REV. The fact is that many
relationships are not strictly binary. Additionally I should not have to
have write access to a remote file to express how I relate to it (not
just how it relates to me).

Extra-document navigational paradigms are good. I'd like to see a browser
(or write a Java applet :) that did an MHEAD depth-first traversal on a site
going 6 or levels deap that built a sketch of the infospace on the site, with
"parents" (or their semantic equivalent given a large glossary for the
"higher" in a hierarchy) towards the top and children (or equiv) towards
the bottom. To this list, it's not so important *how* it's laid out as
that we provide the mechanisms for doing so.

Furthermore, with that kind of information we can build much more
interesting "history" interfaces - instead of a long list that describes
chronologically where you've "been", the browser can create a directional
cyclical graph of the space you've *traversed*. The sooner browser
designers (and content creators!) start considering web sites more like
Disneyland and less like "America's Funniest Home [Videos/Pages]"
we'll all be better off.

Brian

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