rel-license-issues

rel-license issues

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Consider using this format (copy and paste this to the end of the list to add your issues; replace ~~~ with an external link if preferred) to report issues or feedback, so that issues can show up in hAtom subscriptions of this issues page. If open issues lack this markup, please add it.

Please post one issue per entry, to make them easier to manage. Avoid combining multiple issues into single reports, as this can confuse or muddle feedback, and puts a burden of separating the discrete issues onto someone else who 1. may not have the time, and 2. may not understand the issue in the same way as the original reporter.

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 <span class="published">2011-MM-DD</span> 
 raised by <span class="fn">~~~</span>
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* <strong class="entry-title">«Short title of issue»</strong>. «Description of Issue»
** Follow-up comment #1
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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".

• open issue! 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 defined 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'?

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

• open issue! 2008-01-26 raised by Adollar28cents

• 1. How would I specify that there is no license for something, i.e. All Rights Reserved. There is no Creative Commons machine-readable license that says as much, but I want to support and use this microformat.
     • My own solution is that when a URL exists for the license to use both a <LINK> element and an <A> element to link to the license using rel="license DC.rights.license" (i.e. both the rel-license microformat plus Dubin Core), and when no such URL exists, to use a <META> element with name="DC.rights.license" and a content attribute containing a human readable licence description, such as content="All rights reserved." (The phrase "All rights reserved" also appears in the body of the page. Example usage TobyInk 01:53, 18 Feb 2008 (PST)

See also

• rel-faq