Re: Request to register "identifier" relation type

[Ed Summers <[e-mail]>]

Hi Herbert,

> On Aug 9, 2017, at 10:35 AM, Herbert Van de Sompel <[e-mail]> wrote:
> 
> * On August 5, Ed Summers posted a question regarding applying "bookmark" to <link> to the WHATWG list, see https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-whatwg-archive/2017Aug/0001.html. There are no responses to this post, so far.

There have been a few responses if you look at the list of emails for August:

    https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-whatwg-archive/2017Aug/

> * On August 9, Ed Summer posted a similar question to WHATWG/HTML GitHub, see https://github.com/whatwg/html/issues/2899. There is a reaction from @annevk who (1) speculates that the reason "bookmark" is not to be used with <link> might be in order not to overlap with "canonical" (2) suggests the use of "canonical" :-) 

Yes, canonical seems to be the relation that most people are reaching for initially. I did myself on reading your I-D. The fact that seasoned hands like Kevin Marks and Anne van Kesteren are as well says something.

> * Michael Nelson has further explored "bookmark" and has confirmed that there effectively is a reason for not allowing "bookmark" in <link>. It is related to its target use case: surfacing a link for content contained in a *part* of a page. Hence, Michael concludes that making "bookmark" usable with <link> will most likely not happen. @annevk's GitHub response does not seem to contradict that. Michael based his findings on studying http://tantek.com/log/2002/11.html#L20021128t1352 and https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/links.html#link-type-bookmark. He may write another blog post about this, but, for now, here's how he explained on Twitter https://twitter.com/i/moments/895081563653902336

Yes, it looks like that's probably where things will sit. As Anne indicated it's likely that rel=bookmark cannot be used with <link> because of perceived confusion it would cause with canonical. The semantics of parts of pages vs the page itself don't seem terribly significant to me from an implementation perspective. Unfortunately 'identifier' will also probably cause some confusion as well. As systems that rely on 'identifier' get developed that will be something for them to deal with.

Thanks for considering all the questions and tracking the conversation over on the WHATWG list. It speaks to the spirit of what you all are trying to achieve with this I-D.

//Ed