[microformats-discuss] url canonicalization

[Tantek Ç elik]

On 9/26/05 12:46 PM, "Andreas Haugstrup" <solitude at solitude.dk> 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="self" is not exactly the same semantic, but we should consider it.  I
believe the folks I was discussing rel="canonical" with looked at the
definition of "self" and it wasn't strong enough to imply canonical.

rel="canonical" would be a new value, and thus I think it would make sense
to define it to mean this resource over here (href) is the canonical
location for the current resource.

> rel="alternate"? It's in the HTML 4 spec so you don't have to write up a
> microformat. :o)

rel="alternate" is indeed in the HTML4 spec and quite useful to boot.
However, it fails to tell you *which* of the alternates is the canonical URL
(the whole point of canonical is that there is only one).

Thanks,

Tantek