rel-home
<entry-title>rel="home"</entry-title> This document represents a draft microformat specification. Although drafts are somewhat mature in the development process, the stability of this document cannot be guaranteed, and implementers should be prepared to keep abreast of future developments and changes. Watch this wiki page, or follow discussions on the #microformats IRC channel to stay up-to-date.
Draft Specification 2005-12-07
Editor/Author
Copyright
This specification is (C) 2005-2024 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-Home is one of several MicroFormats. By adding rel="home" to a hyperlink, a page indicates that the destination of that hyperlink is the homepage of the site in which the current page appears. When the appropriate HTML Meta data profile is in use, the "home" type can be used alongside standard Link Types.
Example usage :
<head> ... <link href="http://technorati.com" rel="home" /> ... </head>
The rel value may also appear wherever an anchor link may appear, e.g.
<body> ... <a href="http://technorati.com" rel="home">Home</a> ... </body>
the author indicates that the linked page is the homepage of the site.
The linked page SHOULD exist. Use of an absolute URI is recommended.
Scope
rel="home" is designed for site navigation purposes, as well as allowing some description of site structure to be derived from individual pages. Typical use might be in the archive pages of a weblog, pointing back to the front page.
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="home">home</dt>
<dd>Indicates that the referred resource serves as the homepage,
of the site which includes the referring page.</dd>
</dl>
</dd>
</dl>
Examples in the Wild
This section is informative.
The following sites have implemented rel-home, and thus are a great place to start for anyone looking for examples "in the wild" to try parsing, indexing, organizing etc. If your site is marked up with rel-home, feel free to add it to the bottom of this list. Once the list grows too big, we'll make a separate wiki page.
- the my-Warehouse shopsystem implements rel-home into the breadcrumb.
- http://chrisruppel.com uses rel-home as a link in the <head>
- Cleaner Today uses multiple implementations: 1) Moth Trap page uses rel-home in <head> 2) Spider Traps page uses rel="home" on Corner Logo Link & "Home" link in the footer.
- www.jdclark.org uses rel-home on virtually all web pages within the domain and its sub-domains (for example, please see Jordan Clark's profile).
- Tantek.com posts (e.g. Web Actions: Identifying A New Building Block For The Web) use rel="home" as part of the link to the site's alternate feed as such: <link rel="home updates alternate" type="application/atom+xml" href="http://tantek.com/updates.atom" /> to indicate that the link is an alternate for a page that is also the home for the current page, rather than an alternate for the current page.
Implementations
This section is informative. The following implementations have been developed which either generate or parse rel-home links.
Ed. : links to follow
- Opera browser supports rel="home"
- FireFox Link Toolbar - need to confirm
- cmSiteNavigation Toolbar - Firefox Extension that supports rel="home" and rel="directory"
References
Normative References
Informative References
- Dive Into Accessibility (Mark Pilgrim)
Ed. : need to track down previous discussions, e.g. re. Opera
Discussions
Q&A
- If you have any questions about rel-home, check the rel FAQ, and if you don't find answers, add your questions!
Issues
- Please add any issues with the specification to the separate rel-home issues document.
Brainstorming
If this section gets too large (and is not just incorporated into the draft), it can be moved to rel-home-brainstorming.
use with rel-alternate
Many blog post permalink pages have feed autodiscovery links that link from the permalink page via a link element to the feed for the site using just rel="alternate".
This is semantically incorrect as the feed is an alternate for the *site*, not the permalink page.
rel="home" could (and should) be used with rel-alternate to link from a permalink page to the feed for the site (home page). e.g. on tantek.com permalink pages (e.g. recent post), here's a simplified version of the markup:
<link rel="home alternate" type="application/atom+xml" href="../updates.atom" />
This way a feed reader / indexer / search engine knows that the link represents an alternate for the home page relative to the current page, not an alternate for the page itself.
There is one known exception which is that if the alternate link is a feed to the comments on that post, then that would make sense as an actual alternate representation of the post permalink page.
Implementations (consuming parsers) could thus treat these two types of 'alternate' links differently to provide the user a better experience, e.g. with separate buttons for:
- Subscribe to this site
- Subscribe to the comments on this post
FAQ home alternate
Frequently asked questions about rel="home alternate" (likely merits inclusion in rel-faq).
- Doesn't rel="home alternate" mean it's the home page and it's an alternate independently? (as asked [1], [2])
- No. That's not how rel works. Rel values combine. E.g.
rel="alternate stylesheet"has worked this way for over a decade. Rel values also combine with other attributes, e.g. userel="alternate" media="handheld"on a link to a separate mobile-specific version of a page. Tantek 20:56, 10 August 2011 (UTC)- This seems to contradict the spec: "if a single link element has a rel attribute with the value next stylesheet, it creates both a hyperlink (for the next keyword) and an external resource link (for the stylesheet keyword)" implying that they are independant and not related. -- Singpolyma 21:43, 10 August 2011 (UTC)
- That's a non-normative NOTE documentation of what "next stylesheet" and subsequently "author license" mean, and thus (being non-normative) not something you can derive any implications from. The normative language of the spec says: "exactly which and how many links are created depends on the keywords given in the rel attribute" which is precisely correct and provides us the flexibility to define combinations as having meanings. (Note that it does NOT say: create one link per rel value, which it would if the rel values were actually independent, which you can't say in general that they are.) -- Tantek 21:54, 10 August 2011 (UTC)
- This seems to contradict the spec: "if a single link element has a rel attribute with the value next stylesheet, it creates both a hyperlink (for the next keyword) and an external resource link (for the stylesheet keyword)" implying that they are independant and not related. -- Singpolyma 21:43, 10 August 2011 (UTC)
- No. That's not how rel works. Rel values combine. E.g.
discuss home alternate
Discussion of this brainstorm:
- +1 Tantek - as proposed/discussed in IRC
- +1 Kevin Marks though need to check behaviour in browsers that support rel-home on link
- ...