Just as an example, Windows Live Writer uses the service link to discover the location of the Atompub service document; which it then uses to configure itself to interact with one or more Atompub collections.
For instance, in IBM's internal blogging environment, any employee can have one or more blogs. When they use WLW, rather than manually configuring the client for each individual blog, they can simply point WLW to what we call the "dashboard" at http://blogs.tap.ibm.com/weblogs. WLW will get that page, look for the service link, get the service document, and automatically pull out the blogs that user can edit. - James Ian Hickson wrote: > On Mon, 5 Nov 2007, James M Snell wrote: >> rel="service" tells us that the link is pointing to a description of >> some kind of service api, e.g. an atompub service document. > > Ok, but that's very vague -- how is anyone supposed to use this rel type? > I don't understand what problem it solves. >