[uf-discuss] rel="tag"

Fri Jan 5 10:24:15 PST 2007

Fil wrote:
>> I also think the standard should require parsers to match the
>> tag and the visible text (failure meaning the tag is rejected).
>> Careful with this: already having accents is not a piece of cake, 
> but you
> will have to match
> <a rel="tag" href=".../%E3t%E3">&eacute;t&eacute;</a>
> and other niceties (and consider the charset)
> You'll also have the case where the link is on an image...

<a rel="tag" href=".../ee"><abbr title="ee">&eacute;&eacute;</abbr></a>
and
<a rel="tag" href=".../ee"><img alt="ee" src="foo.png"></a>
address both of those problems, respectively.
Ciaran McNulty wrote:
> There are also issues with multilingual sites that might want a
> unified tagging scheme.
>> e.g. <a href="http://example.com/tags/fish" rel="tag">poisson</a>

This is an interesting problem that I have yet to see discussed in 
depth.
We do, however, have a few tools to deal with it:
abbr[title]
a[hreflang]
*[lang]
*[title]
It seems like, at the minimum, you should already be doing
<a href="http://example.com/tags/fish" hreflang="en" 
lang="fr">poisson</a>
I have yet, however, to encounter a site that uses the hreflang 
attribute to
demarcate links to pages in different languages. In fact, based on 
the Google's
Web Authoring Statistics[2], hreflang is used less often than <a ;="">
[2]: http://code.google.com/webstats/2005-12/element-a.html
-- 
Ryan Cannon
Interactive Developer
MSI Student, School of Information
University of Michigan
http://RyanCannon.com