Here’s the conclusion that all the web gurus seem to have drawn over the past months: HTML5 is the future, and that future is slowly creeping into our midst. This article by Dave Shea is the latest proof of that. Then there are inspiration galleries and blogs dedicated to the use of HTML5 for markup, plus hardly any mention of XHTML2 anywhere else.
rel and more meaningful links
But I’m not going to get into the war between the two here; I’ll just focus on a specific development in the arena: link relations. There’s more to it than rel=stylesheet and rel=alternate. About a dozen more.
For example, the Google-imposed rel=nofollow will be officially added in HTML5, but the seemingly convenient rel=feed may be dropped due to browser implementation. Other interesting link relations mentioned are rel=search, which obviously points to a search page, and rel=sidebar, which refers to a document “shown in a secondary browsing context (if possible), instead of in the current browsing context.” More are being proposed here, including rel=accessiblity.
rel seems to be what plugins are to web browsers, so it’s interesting to see how they can make a markup language as extensible as possible.
rev and a less rotten web
Still related to link relations is the rev attribute, which stands for a “reverse link”. It hasn’t been as popular as its cousin rel up until microblogging boomed, and consequently, URL shorteners and the threat of link rot.
Considering just how popular Twitter is these days, particularly as a social media marketing and SEO tool where links are the mode of currency, using rev=canonical to indicate one URL is a shortened version of the other:
Google introduced rel="canonical" recently. It’s a way of pointing from an alternate URL back to the canonical URL of the current document: the relationship of the linked document to the current document is “canonical”.
If you’re linking from the canonical URL to an alternate URL (like, say, a shortened URL), you could use rev=”canonical”: the relationship of the current document to the linked document is “canonical”.
People are also advised to check long URLs at this RevCanonical app to determine whether they already contain shortened ones.
Amidst all the exciting and controversial new directions Twitter is taking since they’ve been announced at the Chirp conference, one stands out: Ev Williams admitting that “Twitter is too hard too use”, even mentioning that the phrase “I don’t get Twitter” is the second suggested search in Google.
After all these years of the pundits identifying Twitter’s strength and eureka moment to be its simplicity, Ev’s statement says a lot about the company. They could have skipped over this detail or worded it in some other way, but talked about it anyway. Sincerely and transparently.
We’ve known this for a long time, but it was growing too fast for us to address these issues.
There are several lessons rolled in here. Despite all of Twitter’s growth in usage and features, they still don’t want to drop the ball on simplicity even if other products probably would have, because they can afford to.
But simplicity doesn’t only mean keeping the number of features at a minimum; it also means being intelligent enough to anticipate what users need. The way Twitter is built makes it into “different things for different people”—hence the explosion of 3rd-party apps and the creation of its own jargon. Retweeting, hashtags, trending topics, recommended users, and lists were all created arbitrarily by the community later on integrated as real features. Now the company is pushing further in location awareness, mobile, infrastructure, and APIs.
As long as there’s this open dialogue among the founders, the users, and all the developers, Twitter will remain as inspiring and innovative as ever.
Have you seen Prologue, the new WordPress theme inspired by Twitter, to say the least. The whole idea is to let groups of people post small blog posts.
Read about it here, visit the demo blog, and nab it for yourself here.
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Microblogging is cool, with Twitter, Jaiku, Tumblr, and Pownce, among others. The latter now have added a mobile interface, apparently not really meant to go online already, but I tried it out, of course.
Before we get to the video, I’d just like to say that I enjoy Pownce a lot. I’m even a pro user. It’s not the place for everyone, but I’ve found interesting people there, made connections, and so on. I guess you could do the same on Facebook or Twitter, but it haven’t worked nearly as well for me as Pownce has.
If you haven’t checked it out do say hi, I’m at pownce.com/tdh. Give a shout in the comments if you need an invite, although they are rarely hard to come by.
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