[uf-discuss] Wanted: a pattern indicating a subsidiary-parent-company relationship

[Mirko Gustony]

Hello Tantek,

On Mon, Jun 15, 2009 at 11:50 PM, Tantek Çelik<tantek at cs.stanford.edu> wrote:
>> I need to mark up the following: on the website for company B Ltd. I
>> want to sho that it's a subsidiary of A Inc.
>>
>> <p>
>> Part of <a href="http://www.a-inc.com/">A Inc.</a>
>> </p>
>
> Could you provide a URL to the website for company B? [1]

Unfortunately not for this particular use case. I am currently in the
process of redesigning a website where the requirement is to have a
text like the one above on every page in the header.

> I've captured this area as "business to business" relationships on the
> XFN brainstorming page, along with POSH suggestions:
>
> http://microformats.org/wiki/xfn-brainstorming#business_to_business

Thanks for pointing me there. I immediately stopped reading after the
stop words "human relations" :)

IMHO rel="controlling" seems to be a bit misleading to me.

Using my previous example:
<p>Part of <a href="http://www.a-inc.com/" rel="controlling">A Inc.</a></p>

I would understand (from the definition of rel-attribute [1]) that B
Ltd. is controlling A Inc. but it should the other way round (or do I
get it wrong?). So a better wording should be used (maybe
"parentgroup" or something like that). Whereas rel="subsidiary" should
be quite clear.

Anyway: A real world example could be [2] where the corporate group
links to its subsidiaries, and the subsidiaries will link back
indicating the reverse relation (this looks like a lot of javascript,
but you will get the idea).

Another example could be [3] for the same use case.

There might be another use case when companies are accredited dealers
of another company (and the other way round) and want to show this
using a microformat. An example could be [4].

> Thanks,
>
> Tantek
>

Regards,
Mirko


[1] "This attribute describes the relationship from the current
document to the anchor specified by the href attribute."
<http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/struct/links.html#adef-rel>
[2] <http://www.zeppelin.com/E/konzern/081965de.html>
[3] <http://www.ge.com/directory/business_sites.html>
[4] <http://www.cat.com/dealer-locator> (you'll have to start a search
to get a list of dealers)