rel-license-issues

Issues

• 2005-06-21 raised by Hixie
  1. Issue H-1: This specification is lacking a user agent conformance section. There's basically nothing that says how rel=license must be handled.
     • ACCEPTED. The specification should have a conformance section describing what UAs should do.
  2. Issue H-2: What's the point of rel="license"?
     • ACCEPTED. The specification should provide better documentation explaining this (it tries to now, but obviously failed for this particular reader). In particular rel="license" enables a content author to explicitly express in a machine readable way what license(s) the content is licensed under, in particular, by using licenses that reside at external URLs, commonly maintained by various open source and related organizations.

• 2005-12-09 raised by Kenny Heaton
  1. There needs to be an explicit explanation of when to use rel-license which "Indicates that the referred resource is a license for the referring page.", and when to use the W3C defined copyright link type which "Refers to a copyright statement for the current document." since copyright and licensing are similar concepts and can be confused.
     • ACCEPTED. MOVE TO FAQ. The HTML 4.01 spec defines the 'copyright' rel value as: "Refers to a copyright statement for the current document." Indeed this is very similar to the license provision, however not exactly the same. Often documents have a their own local copyright statement which includes links to one or more licenses. See the XFN home page for example, which uses both a <link rel="copyright> in the header to reference a local copyright statement, and within that, links to a Creative Commons license with rel="license".

• 2006-04-07 raised by Evan
  1. Issue 1: It's not clear how to associate a license with part of a page, such as an image or embedded object in the page, or a single news entry on a news page. A typical use-case would be a Flickr page, for which the image is licensed under a CC license but the page itself is not.
  2. Issue 2: there's not a clear explanation of how/when to use a <link> element with rel='copyright' (as definied in the HTML spec) and an <a> element with rel='license'.
  3. Issue 3: the Dublin Core 'license' element seems to have the exact same semantics as this standard. There's an encoding standard for Dublin Core in <meta> and <link> elements, which seems like it would be an easy extension to rel attributes in <a> elements. Can we find some compatibility between the Dublin Core 'license' and rel='license'?

• 2006-07-19 raised by DrErnie
• Now that RFC 4946 specifies rel-license for Atom, should we adopt that as a normative reference?

See also

• rel-faq