rel-tag-issues

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relTag Issues

These are externally raised issues about rel-tag with broadly varying degrees of merit. Thus some issues are REJECTED for a number of obvious reasons (but still documented here in case they are re-raised), and others contain longer discussions. Some issues may be ACCEPTED and perhaps cause changes or improved explanations in the spec. Submitted issues may (and probably will) be edited and rewritten for better terseness, clarity, calmness, rationality, and as neutral a point of view as possible. Write your issues well. — Tantek

Issues

Please use this format:

  • YYYY-MM-DD raised by AUTHORNAME
    1. Issue 1: Here is the first issue I have.
    2. Issue 2: Here is the second issue I have.


  • 2005-06-21 raised by Hixie
    1. Issue H-1: This specification is lacking a user agent conformance section. Does the UA simply crawl the DOM looking for all <html:a> elements with a "rel" attribute that contains a "tag" keyword (after space-separated splitting) and then grab the href="" value? How about relative links? Must they implement xml:base? <html:base>? Other things?
    2. Issue H-2: What's the point? Isn't free-text search more effective than relying on people to remember to put a particular tag?
  • 2006-01-10 raised by Adam Willard
    1. Issue 1: Somewhat confused. Please either fix or elaborate the difference in the URLs in the Tag Spaces area -> is it /tag/ or /tags/ or /wiki/. Is this URI changeable or is this just showing other implementations. If this is the case I am confused on the implementation. Should /wiki/ only show tagged content of wiki? Should URIs be constructed as /definition/ /blog/ etc... to return those items? Or is it just returning pages and the webmaster just decided on /wiki/ or /tag/ or /applicationdir/?
      • ACCEPTED FAQ - We need to make this an FAQ entry. --RyanKing 14:46, 25 Jan 2006 (PST) (@TODO)
    2. Issue 2: More information on actually implementing a tag space would be helpful. I wrote a tagging system on our intranet and we run IIS. So I had to install URLrewrite (ISAPI) to create the URI /tag/tagname. We horrible Microsoft people are't as lucky to have Mod Rewrite.
      • REJECTED IRRELEVANT - Implementing a tagspace is well outside the bounds of the rel-tag specification. --RyanKing 14:46, 25 Jan 2006 (PST)
  • 2006-02-09 raised by JonathanFeinberg
    1. Issue 1: It's bizarre to have the tag be denoted by the URL. The content of the a tag is a perfectly suitable place to contain the tag.
      • REJECTED, IGNORES ESTABLISHED PRACTICE. Flickr and del.icio.us and other tagging sites established the defacto standard of having the tag term be denoted by the last segment in the URL. rel-tag was designed to leverage that existing behavior. Theoretical arguments about suitability are irrelevant in the fact of overwhelming existing practice.
    2. Issue 2: There's no way to distinguish between an individual user's notion of a tag and a global tag (i.e., Fred's java tag versus all things tagged with java.
      • REJECTED UNTRUE. ACCEPTED FAQ. Tag spaces (see rel-tag specification) are used for distinguishing, e.g. Flickr does this with photos from one user with a tag, vs. photos from all users with a tag. to-do - add this to the the rel-tag-faq.
    3. Issue 3: It's not reasonable to restrict the host's REST implementation according to this spec's rather limited idea of a "good" tag URL. The idea of tags as query parameters is rejected without justification, for example. Query parameters are a perfectly legitimate means of denoting state.
      • REJECTED, IGNORES ESTABLISHED PRACTICE. Flickr and del.icio.us and other tagging sites established the defacto standard of having the tag term be denoted by the last segment in the URL and thus defined what makes a "good" tag URL. rel-tag has codified this good practice.
  • 2006-02-09 raised by Robert Yates
    1. Issue 1: So I work alongside Jonathan at Lotus / IBM and we have several systems in development each with their own tag implementations. All of them have their own pages that are dedicated to listing the things within them that have been tagged by a given tag. Some of these systems use a url notation that ends in /tag but many (the majority) do not. We are looking to have a standard way that these systems can sematically tag their tags and relTag looked very promising. However, given that some of the systems produce tag urls that do not end in /tag we are a little stuck. It would be extremely hard and somewhat impracticle to get all these groups to ensure that their tag urls end in /tag. Are you at all considering another approach. We'd love to use relTag within our products, but at the moment we can't. Looking for some help / guidance.
      • Clarification: By '/tag' do you mean '/<tag-name>'? --RyanKing 15:21, 9 Feb 2006 (PST)
        • yes -- rob yates 18:56, 9 Feb 2006 (EST)
      • I wanted to do a quick survey to see how many other sites would struggle to easily adopt this format, due to the fact that they don't currently end their tag urls '/<tag-name>'. While I definately agree that ending with '/<tag-name>' is a best practice, I do feel that their needs to be an option for sites that don't do this, but still want to semantically tag their tags. Here's some sites that I found that cannot easily adopt reltag without reworking server side logic. There's some pretty big names on this list.


  • 2006-04-06 raised by Evan
    1. The scope says 'rel="tag" is specifically designed for "tagging" content, typically web pages (or portions thereof, like blog posts).', but it's not clear how to associate a tag with one portion of a web page and not another. Some common use cases: image galleries, blog posts, yellow-pages directories, hcard directories, del.icio.us-style lists of bookmarks. Does the tag apply to the <a> element's immediate containing element? All containing elements? One possibility I suggest: the tag applies to the most immediately enclosing element with an "id" attribute (addressable, at least in XHTML, as #idval), or to the entire page if there is no such element. Another possibility is having a tagtarget class, so that the parent with that class is the object being tagged.
  • 2006-11-24 raised by Andy Mabbett
    1. Why not also allow tagging on within-page links (i.e. after "#" as well as after "/")? Then, if I have a page with sub-sections, each of those could be a tag, according to their ID:
<ul class="navbar">
<li><a href="#whisky" rel="tag">Whisky</a></li>
<li><a href="#wine" rel="tag">Wine</a></li>
</ul>
[...]
<h2 id="whisky">"Whisky</h2>
[...]
<h2 id="wine">"Wine</h2>
[...]
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