Link Types

October 24, 2003 | View Comments (5) | Category: Design

Summary: What link types are used for and how they help to build a more semantic web.

Some people know about link types some people don't. For the longest time I fell in the people who don't category. Link types are the "meta" tags that you find in the headers of HTML documents. MT has them by default for the individual archives pages. They use the "prev" and "next" link types. I had no idea what these meant. So I went hunting on the W3C page and found all the information I needed.

Authors may use the following recognized link types, listed here with their conventional interpretations. In the DTD, %LinkTypes refers to a space-separated list of link types. White space characters are not permitted within link types.

Link types are used to help build a more semantic web that allows for search engines or user agents to become aware of the structure of a website. Almost any website is nothing more than a collection of documents and more than likely each document has a relationship to the others. As mentioned before MT associates individual archives with each other by pointing to the previous entry and the proceeding entry. This gives the site a structure that many web designers may not have noticed before. The syntax for creating these "prev" and "next" links is really simple.

<link rel="prev" href="previous.html" />

Many designers have been using link-types within the <head> of their html document for years when linking to stylesheets and alternate stylesheets. Other link types include index, index, copyright, and glossary. For the complete list check out the W3C page on link types.

Link types can play a very important role in the progress of the semantic web. It seems the W3C has the right ideas for how they view the web, but it is a shame they really do not make these techniques well-known to people outside of their group. A very useful link type that many designers may appreciate is the "bookmark" link type which helps to specify different bookmarks within a document. If these link types are used properly, I am sure it would not be too difficult for someone to come up with a script that would parse through your directories and create a table of contents or sitemap for your websites. Really there are so many possibilities to these things, but it might be too much for some designers to handle, because it is beginning to seem like everyday we have to learn something new. Doesn't bother me since I like to learn anyways.

Trackback URL: http://9rules.com/cgi-bin/mt/mt-tb.cgi/37

Comments

#1

Your code in the second blockquote doesn't display in my browsers (Firebird 0.7 and IE6, Windows XP Pro).

Robert

#2

That's because the angle brackets are written as HTML rather than as ASCII text. Thats how it looks like to me anyway.

pete (http://www.monkiboi.net)

#3

A while back, I looked in to the different link types, and set them all up in my blog. The net affect was that Mozilla users could use the Site Navigation bar to get around my site.

Sadly, Mozilla Firebird lack this feature (by default), but if you grab the Links toolbar extension, you'll get a similar toolbar in the right side of the status bar.

milbertus (http://www.milbertus.com)

#4

Fixed...whoops...ummm...I have no excuses.

Scrivs (http://www.9rules.com/whitespace/)

#5

milbertus: hmmm, I will definitely have to look into that. That sounds geekly fascinating.

Scrivs (http://www.9rules.com/whitespace/)

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