Canonical Reverse Or Wisdom Defying Shorturl?

2009-04-14T13:52:10Z

Mark Nottingham: I think this sort of thing is going to happen more often, not less. Microsoft and Netscape unilaterally extended the Web with MARQUEE and BLINK, and it was ugly, but the impact wasn’t nearly as bad as countless Web developers all extending the Web in their own way could be. The onus is clearly upon organisations like the W3C and IETF to make themselves as transparent and approachable to developers as possible, so that the latent experience and expertise in them can be drawn upon by these innovators, instead of being seen as either irrelevant or impediments.

Observations:

rel="alternate" (for feeds) happened in 2002, nofollow happened in 2005. rel=canonical in February 2009, rev=canonical in April 2009.
The current HTML5 definition normatively defines rel values on a wiki page, and even specifies compliance criteria for conformance checkers based on this information.
Those that defined rel=canonical didn’t consult the wiki, and I see no evidence that they considered the overlap with rel=self (which also wasn’t in the registry at the time, in fact it still isn’t now).
HTML5 didn’t deprecate rev, it omitted it.
Twitter (the apparent raison d’être for this function) doesn’t yet support this. It may never.

Analysis:

There is too few data points to conclude that there is any acceleration going on. The data we have is consistent with acceleration. It also is consistent with there being a few minor relationships being defined a year, and a “major” one being defined every other year or so, randomly skipping some years, and doubling up occasionally.
Based on the definitions provided in RFC 2119, it would make more sense if HTML5 deprecated rather than omitted rev.
shorturl is simply better. It also is not (yet?) on the wiki page. In its place is an apparent edit war defining different names (still in flux). Classic bikeshed.
If transparency and approachability are the solutions, then we need something radically more transparent and approachable than a wiki page. Now that’s a sobering thought.