[microformats-discuss] url canonicalization

[Ryan King]

On Sep 26, 2005, at 12:56 PM, Kevin Marks wrote:
> On Sep 26, 2005, at 12:46 PM, Andreas Haugstrup wrote:
>> On Mon, 26 Sep 2005 21:34:37 +0200, Ryan King  
>> <ryan at technorati.com> wrote:
>>> http://username.livejournal.com/
>>> http://livejournal.com/~username/
>>> http://livejournal.com/users/username/
>>>
>>> Perhaps there is a case for using a microformat for declaring one  
>>> of these as canonical. It doesn't seem to me that rel="canonical"  
>>> or rel="self" will cover this.
>>
>> rel="alternate"? It's in the HTML 4 spec so you don't have to  
>> write up a microformat. :o)
>
> Alternate is fine, except it doesn't indicate which should be  
> considered the preferred one, and is also combined with other  
> indicators (eg lang)
>
> Expressing which is the canonical link alternative is useful.

Right. The idea of canonicalization is that "among all the  
alternates, this is the preferred one."

> Possibly related is this discussion on translations from January:
>
> http://epeus.blogspot.com/ 
> 2005_01_01_epeus_archive.html#110513233021128637

Thanks for that link. Good discussion.

> There the notion of rel="original" and rel="translation" was mooted.
>
> I think the notion of "canonical" is distinct from this.
>
> The other possibly-related term is rel="bookmark" which indicates  
> which link to preserve for later reference (used for blog  
> permalinks among other things).

Right. rel-bookmark, though not an official standard, has a strong  
emergent practice and might actually capture the semantics we need here.

-ryan

--
Ryan King
ryan at technorati.com