vote-links

Vote Links

Specification 2005

Editor

• Tantek Çelik (Technorati, Inc., formerly of Microsoft Corporation)

Concept

• Kevin Marks (Technorati, Inc.)

Authors

• Kevin Marks (Technorati, Inc)
• Tantek Çelik (Technorati, Inc)

Copyright

This specification is (C) 2004-2024 by the authors. However, the authors intend to submit (or already have submitted, see details in the spec) this specification to a standards body with a liberal copyright/licensing policy such as the GMPG, IETF, and/or W3C. Anyone wishing to contribute should read their copyright principles, policies and licenses (e.g. the GMPG Principles) and agree to them, including licensing of all contributions under all required licenses (e.g. CC-by 1.0 and later), before contributing.

• Tantek: I release all my contributions to this specification into the public domain and I encourage the other authors to do so as well.
  • When all authors/editors have done so, we can remove the MicroFormatCopyrightStatement template reference and replace it with the MicroFormatPublicDomainContributionStatement.

Patents

This specification is subject to a royalty free patent policy, e.g. per the W3C Patent Policy, and IETF RFC3667 & RFC3668.

Inspiration and Acknowledgments

Thanks to everyone who has given feedback on VoteLinks. Thanks especially to EtanWexler, who provided the first really good documentation that VoteLinks should be using 'rev' instead of 'rel' (see VoteLinksFAQ), and John Allsopp who similarly challenged the use of 'rel', and helped co-author the RelFAQ exploring questions and issues about the use of the HTML4 'rel', 'rev' attributes and linktypes in general.

Introduction

Indexing and tracking applications treat all links as endorsements, or expressions of support. This is a problem, as we need to link to those we disagree with as well, to discuss why.

Specification

VoteLinks is an elemental microformat, one of several microformat open standards. We propose a set of three new values for the rev attribute of the <a> (hyperlink) tag in HTML.

The new values are "vote-for" "vote-abstain" or "vote-against", which are mutually exclusive, and represent agreement, abstention or indifference, and disagreement respectively.

A link without an explicit vote 'rev' value is deemed to have value "vote-for" or "vote-abstain", depending on the application.

Additional human-readable commentary can be added using the existing 'title' attribute, which most browsers show as a rollover.

Examples:

<a rev="vote-for" href="http://ragingcow.blogspot.com"  
   title="neat spoof">Raging Cow</a>
<a rev="vote-against" href="http://ragingcow.com"  
   title="nasty corn syrup drink">Raging Cow</a>

Deprecated: Using 'rel' for VoteLinks

A previous draft of the specification used the 'rel' value instead of the 'rev' attribute. Analysis and feedback has demonstrated this to have been inappropriate use of the 'rel' attribute, when the 'rev' attribute was much more important. See the RelFAQ for more details.

Implementations MAY support links with the VoteLinks values in the 'rel' attribute for backward compatibility with any existing VoteLinks content.

Authors MUST NOT use 'rel' for VoteLinks values.

XMDP profile

<dl class="profile">
 <dt id="rev">rev</dt>
 <dd><p><a rel="help" href="http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/struct/links.html#adef-rev">
         HTML4 definition of the 'rev' attribute.</a>  
  Here are some additional values.</p>
  <dl>
   <dt id="vote-for">vote-for</dt>
   <dd>Indicates agreement with or recommendation for the referred resource.</dd>
   <dt id="vote-abstain">vote-abstain</dt>
   <dd>Indicates abstention or indifference for the referred resource.</dd>
   <dt id="vote-against">vote-against</dt>
   <dd>Indicates disagreement with or recommendation against the referred resource.</dd>
  </dl>
 </dd>
</dl>

Implementations

This section is informative.

• Following a vote-links claim Brian Ellin implemented vote-links on Jyte within less than 30 minutes.
• Paolo Massa created SemanticLinks, a small Firefox extension that shows vote-for, vote-against links information. (Note the download links for SemanticLinks have been removed by the author.)
• Wordpress VoteBack (vote-link aware pingback and trackback) plugin is in testing at VoteBack (Steve Ivy) - looking for testers!
• I've created a small and very simple Greasemonkey script for parsing vote-links [script|testpage]

Normative References

• XMDP

Related Work

• xoxo
• XFN
• Attention.xml
• rellicense
• reltag
• relnofollow

FAQ

• See vote-links-faq and the broader rel-faq.
• See also vote-links-issues for issues which have been raised with the votelinks microformat.