Sjoerd Visscher wrote: > > fantasai wrote: > >> >> The difference between <link> and <a> is that >> - <link> applies to the document as a whole: it indicates a >> relationship >> between this document and the href destination. >> - <a> is a contextual link: it indicates a relationship between the >> linking context and the href destination. >> >> They have different purposes. It is imho perfectly reasonable to limit >> autodiscovery to <link>s only. It is also perfectly reasonable to link >> to feeds with <a>, and expect that the UA will recognize it as a feed >> rather than a generic XML document. >> > > Like I wrote before, this is not how HTML 4.01 (or XHTML 2.0 for that > matter) defines the rel attribute on a hyperlink: > > This attribute describes the relationship from the current document to > the anchor specified by the href attribute. The value of this > attribute is a space-separated list of link types.
Using @rel with any linking element is perfectly valid and has been for years. @rel not being supported for anything other than the link element itself has also been an outstanding bug for just as long. There's lot of debate attached to at least one Mozilla bug (#57399 [1] - filed on 2000-10-20). Can we agree that this should be supported, but currently isn't? Unless there's a compelling reason not to, I think we might as well allow autodiscovery via either element. Any implementation guide should recommend duplicating the information in the interest of autodiscovery actually working. [1] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=57399 -Nikolas 'Atrus' Coukouma
