Martin McEvoy writes: > > o 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:
In which cases doesn't it? If A is the author of B then B was made by A, surely? > "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. Indeed, but nobody is suggesting that would be appropriate. > rev="author" is clearly better semantics in the above case? Yes, if using rev. Without rev it could be written as rel=made, because made is the opposite of author. > > 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) Data of what people have actually done, with the existence of current browsers and standards, informs many decisions. > surely all it needed was to define some rev values (the same as rel) > and people will start using rev correctly? What semantics do you think authors who wrote rev=stylesheet were meaning to convey? Presumably not that the webpage containing it is the style-sheet for the CSS file that it linked to -- so it's definitely a mistake by the author. If what the author meant to write was rel=stylesheet then HTML 5 is surely an improvement, by dropping the confusing rev=stylesheet? Or do you think something else is commonly meant by rev=stylesheet? > > 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. Which? Smylers