<LINK>

Defines relationship to other pages or objects

Element to define relationships with other pages or objects. Another appendage that keeps being drug around the HTML standard. It was originally intended to provide information to browsers to be used in navigation bars and the like. But none of the players have taken advantage of it, hence, nobody hardly uses it. Maybe some day it'll catch on and be used (or it'll fade away into the sunset). Anyway, if you're so disposed, here it is.

	<html>
	<head>
	<title>Page with some hidden stuff on it</title>
	  .
	  .
==>>	<link rel=Contents href=index.htm>
	  .
	  .
	</head>
	<body>
	  .
	  .
	</body>
	</html>

I've got to apologize to Dave Raggett over at W3C. I've not used this element. I kind of get the feeling that he would like to see more of us use this method and he'd like some browser developers to take advantage of it. He did spend a lot of time describing it so I'll try to do it justice as well.

HTML 3.2 Final

The link element provides a "media independent" method for describing relationships with other documents.

"LINK elements can be used in principle:

a. for document specific navigation toolbars or menus
b. to control how collections of HTML files are rendered into printed documents
c. for linking associated resources such as styl sheets and scripts
d. to provide alternative forms of the current document"

--Dave Raggett, W3C, HTML 3.2 Reference Specification

Maybe if we were to start a rumor that the web crawlers read this information to use in their indexes then we'd get the attention of the developers. They'd be stuffing stuff in here left and right trying to get their pages referenced!

If one were to use them you'd do it using the following rules:

href: Gives the URL of the linked item.
rel: Use this to specify what kind of relationship exists between this document and the document identified by the href URL. There are no real standards on what these values would be but Mr. Raggett has provided some very good suggestions in the spec. I could refer you to it but that'd be kinda lazy on my part so I'll list them here:
=top - points to the first or cover page in a document
=contents - points to the table of contents document for this document
=index - points to an index for this document
=glossary - points to a glossary of terms for this document
=copyright - points to copyright information for this document
=next - points to the next page in the document that naturally follows this one
=previous - points to the page that precedes this page in the document
=help - points to a page that provides help for the document (context, overview, etc.)
=search - references a page that provides additional links to material related to the subject

The more I think about this element the more I like it. Too bad nobody's really jumped on it. Of course it's not as sexy as animated graphics, ActiveX, Java, JavaBeans, Scriplets or Javascript - but it does look useful.
rev: This defines a reverse relationship from this document to the href document.
title: A title for the href item, kind of like alt on an img tag.

Netscape

Ignored.

Microsoft Internet Explorer

Ignored.

Internationalization

Nothing special.

Michael T. Rusk
Comments to author: mike@ruskfamily.com

Revised: Sunday, December 30, 2007 11:06 -0500
URL: ./htmlgd/taglink.html