rel-product brainstorming

What rel-product will change in your life

With rel-product it would be easier to go to some product website by just searching for its name, for instance you want to go the iPod website, so you go to some microformat search engine that could suport rel-product and search for iPod. if some site has linked http://www.apple.com/iPod/iPod.html with rel-product you will find it.

Proposals

Draft Proposal for rel-product 2006-06-10

Author

Rafael Gaspar

Rafael, please read the microformats process and please join the microformats-discuss list so we can help walk you through the steps in the process in order to best develop your idea for a microformat. E.g. there may better names, as what you are focusing on for this is the OFFICIALness rather than the PRODUCTness of the destination of the link. In addition, what you are describing is not really a relationship FROM the source TO the destination (please read rel-faq), what you are describing is more something "about" the destination, which is perhaps better done by tagging the destination link as "OFFICIAL" either via xFolk or hReview. - Tantek

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.

Patents

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

Abstract

rel-product is a proposal for a microformat. By adding rel="product" to an hyperlink indicates that the destination of that hyperlink is the Product Website.

e.g. by placing this link on a page,

<a href="http://www.apple.com/ipod/ipod.html" rel="product">iPod</a>

the author indicates that the link points to Product Website.

The linked page SHOULD be the Website, And the text of the hyperlink SHOULD be the product name.

Scope

rel="product" is specifically designed for referencing the OFFICIAL website of the product; content, typically hosted on its own company website.

rel="product" is NOT designed for referencing arbitrary URLs or Shopping Websites with this product.

XMDP profile

<dl class="profile">
 <dt id="rel">rel</dt>
 <dd><p>
   <a rel="help" href="http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/struct/links.html#adef-rel">
     HTML4 definition of the 'rel' attribute.</a>  
   Here is an additional value.</p>
  <dl>
   <dt id="product">product</dt>
   <dd>Indicates that the referred resource is the OFFICIAL website of the product specified into the hyperlink text.</dd>
  </dl>
 </dd>
</dl>

Encoding issues

Spaces can be encoded either as + or %20. Unicode characters are encoded as specified in RFC 3986.

Implementations

This section is informative.

By now there is no rel-product implementation.

My idea is a search engine like Technorati Contact Search

References

Normative References

HTML 4
XHTML 1
XMDP
RFC 3986 specifies URL syntax. Section 3.3 specifies URL paths and path segments.

Discussion and Issues

This needs broader discussion on the microformats-discuss list and proper following of the microformats process before proceeding any further.

rel-product-brainstorming