[microformats-discuss] rel="payment" : specification draft

[Joshua Kinberg]

=== rel="payment" - Draft 2005-07-20 ===

Author: Andreas Haugstrup Pedersen
Concept: Joshua Kinberg, Peter Van Dijck, Jay Dedman

== Abstract ==

RelPayment is a microformat for making exchanges of support (be it
financial or otherwise) possible. By adding rel="payment" to a
hyperlink a page indicates that the destination of that hyperlink
provides a way to show or give support for the current page. For
example to give financial support to the owner of the current page.

One of the goals with this microformat is to give content aggregators
such as RSS readers a way to extract these support links and give them
special attention (such as displaying a standard button along with the
content).

== RelPayment ==

RelPayment is meant as a general way to facilitate acts of support,
and thus this specification makes no assumptions on the type of
support.

A page may contain any number of hyperlinks marked with rel="payment".
This allows authors to give readers more than one possible way to show
support (a DropCash link, a PayPal link, a link to a Cafe Press store,
a link to a page with an address to mail a check and so on). It also
allows authors to add payment links that only relate to a certain
section of a page, e.g. a book review website may have several book
reviews on one page with each review having their own Amazon Affiliate
link marked with rel="payment".

Authors should use the "title" attribute to provide a human readable
description of the type of support pointed to by the hyperlink.
Aggregators may use the contents of the "title" attribute to provide
additional information about the support link to their users, e.g. <a
href="[url]" rel="payment" title="Donate Money Via PayPal">.

If the hyperlink contains an image (e.g. <a href="[url]
rel="payment"><img src="[url]" alt="Support Badge" /></a>) aggregators
may display instead of their standardized links.

== Visible Metadata ==

Links marked with rel="payment" are meant to be visible on the page,
and because of that the <a> element is encouraged over the <link>
element. This gives readers the easiest access to show support and it
discourages link fraud. Authors should not use empty hyperlinks such
as <a href="[url]" rel="payment" /> and parsers may ignore empty
links.

== XMDP profile ==

<dl class="profile">
 <dt id="rel">rel</dt>
 <dd><p>
   <a rel="help" href="http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/struct/links.html#adef-rel">
     HTML4 definition of the 'rel' attribute.</a>  
   Here is an additional value.</p>
  <dl>
   <dt id="payment">payment</dt>
   <dd>Indicates that the referred resource provides a way to show
support for the referring page.</dd>
  </dl>
 </dd>
</dl>