[uf-new] RFC: @rel for privacy policy and T&C links

[Toby Inkster]

On Wed, 18 Aug 2010 10:19:11 -0400
Schuyler Duveen <sky at columbia.edu> wrote:

> which proposes embedding such a file in many ways, one of which would
> be: <link rel="P3Pv1"
>      href="http://catalog.example.com/P3P/PolicyReferences.xml">  
> 
> but this is outside of my use-case, since it's a machine-readable
> form.

rel="P3Pv1" is rather irksome: generally speaking, a rel value
shouldn't make any assumptions about the media-type of the document
being linked to.

As it happens, I suggested deprecating rel="P3Pv1" in favour of
rel="privacy" way back in 2003 when reviewing XHTML 2.0:

<http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-html-editor/2003AprJun/0048.html>

Note that I don't necessarily agree with everything in that message any
more (a lot can change in 7.25 years!) but still think that a more
general link type would be an improvement.

A solution you could try is to include a rel="P3Pv1" link to a URL that
performs content-negotiation between a P3P file and something
human-readable.

-- 
Toby A Inkster
<mailto:mail at tobyinkster.co.uk>
<http://tobyinkster.co.uk>