rel-product

Draft Specification 2005-01-10

Editor/Author

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 one of several MicroFormats. By adding rel="product" to a hyperlink, a page indicates that the destination of that hyperlink is the Offical 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 Official Product Website.

The linked page SHOULD be the Official Website, And the text of the hyperlink SHOULD be the Product Name.

<a href="http://technorati.com/tag/tech" rel="tag">fish</a>

would indicate the tag "tech" rather than "fish".

Scope

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

rel="tag" is NOT designed for referencing arbitrary URLs or Shopping Websites with this product. There is demand for a general decentralized syntax for tagging URLs, and that is certainly something to think about, but this is not meant for that. See xFolk and hReview for ways to tag arbitrary URLs.

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.

Discussions

Feedback is encouraged on the rel-product-feedback page.

Issues

Please add any issues with the specification to the separate rel-product issues document.

rel-product-brainstorming