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

Craig Hubley (craig@passport.ca)
Mon, 1 May 95 14:22:01 EDT

> Amazing how fast things can change on this list! Exactly a week ago,
> in the midst of a much longer document ("More comments on HTML 3.0"),
> I repeated something I had said earlier, namely that I didn't see what
> REV could add that REL couldn't express.
>
> That short line got picked up, but nobody seemd to agree with me. But
> suddenly everything has changed, REL is going to be standardized in an
> HTML-independent way, and REV is going to be dropped. Nice work!

I'll refrain from stating an opinion on REV until I see what SCO has
done with it... they have implemented both REL and REV in their browser
I understand, and I don't want to dump something without understanding it.
This will have to wait until Murray gets back.

> If I interpret the last messages by Dan Connolly and Craig Hubley
> correctly, then it seems that REL is the functor of a 2-place
> predicate, the 1st arg of which is the current document, the 2nd is
> the document in the HREF-attribute, or symbolically: "REL(BASE,HREF)"

That's pretty much how I see it. Is there any *other* way ?

> scheme:/valuepart/valuepart/.../valuepart
>
> (much like URLs, including the rules for relative values). For
> example:

I think links should *be* URIs, a relationship is as legitimate an object
as an entity.

> cooklink:/recipe/expensive

This is not relative, you would be saying 'more expensive'.

> mathlink:/example

This is more like it.

> *) For the moment, the implicit BASE is "htmllink:/", so that
> "previous" expands to "htmllink:/previous".

Yes something like this.

> Both: a global syntactic mechanism and a semantics for one corner of
> that world. (The same is true of URLs).

Better stated.

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