Microformats Wiki - User contributions [en]

rel-tag-issues

2009-07-23T19:19:13Z

Bloritsch:

= 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. — [http://tantek.com/log/ Tantek]

== Issues ==

{{issues-format}}

* {{OpenIssue}} 2007-03-28 raised by [[User:JamesCraig|James Craig]]
*# [[internationalization|Internationalization]] (i18n) issue with restful tag spaces. Restful tag spaces cannot be used with non-western characters unless escaped in unicode, which renders a restful tag space quite pointless. For example:
*#*A Japanese Katakana tag ピフ would have to be <nowiki>http://example.com/tags/%E3%83%94%E3%83%95/</nowiki>
*#*A Hindi Devanagri tag चट would have to be <nowiki>http://example.com/tags/%E0%A4%9A%E0%A4%9F/</nowiki>
::There should be another way to specify the human-readable tagname.
*#*One possible solution is to provide a "romaji" or transliteration of the characters to the Latin alphabet. It would be a bit troublesome for pictographic alphabets such as kanji, but it would work well for Russian, Katakana, Hiragana, and similar phonetic alphabets. This i18n issue is a problem for URLs in general, a more fundamental issue that has to be fixed. The URL spec was created before UTF existed. (NOTE: index names for tags can be different from the raw tag, as demonstrated by Flickr). [[User:Bloritsch|Bloritsch]] 19:19, 23 July 2009 (UTC)

* {{OpenIssue}} 2007-01-10 raised by [[User:AndyMabbett|Andy Mabbett]]
*# I recently received an e-mail circular, asking that images and blog posts about a particular event be tagged in the style:

::20070110 AB123YZ postcode:uk=AB123YZ upcoming:id=123456 upcoming:event=19876 upcoming:venue=14567 url=example.com geocoded geotagged geo:lat=52.3456 geo:lon=-1.2345

:Is any work being done, to document such tag "schema"? [[User:AndyMabbett|Andy Mabbett]] 12:43, 10 Jan 2007 (PST)

: Isn't that several different tags? I.e. "20070110", "AB123YZ", "postcode:uk=AB123YZ" .... At least this is how a site like Flickr would decipher it. The rel-tag standard handles each one separately, although the "machine tags" (as Flickr calls them) have the same issues as the i18n issue above. [[User:Bloritsch|Bloritsch]] 18:00, 17 July 2009 (UTC)

* {{OpenIssue}} 2005-06-21 raised by Hixie
*# ''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?
*# ''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?
*#* Tags are used for various reasons, including the ability to re-find information later. Free text search has its own issues, including raising the signal to noise ratio of search results.

* 2006-01-10 raised by Adam Willard
*# ''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. --[[User:RyanKing|RyanKing]] 14:46, 25 Jan 2006 (PST) (@TODO)
*# ''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 aren't as lucky to have Mod Rewrite.''
*#* REJECTED IRRELEVANT - Implementing a tagspace is well outside the bounds of the rel-tag specification. --[[User:RyanKing|RyanKing]] 14:46, 25 Jan 2006 (PST)

* 2006-02-09 raised by JonathanFeinberg
*# ''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.
*# ''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]].
*# ''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
*# ''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>'? --[[User:RyanKing|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.
*#*:* O'Reilly.com. See the tags at this url http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2004/11/10/delicious.html note: O'Reilly uses javascript and AJAX to populate the content on page. This is definitely not standard.
*#*:* Dodgeball. http://boston.dodgeball.com/tags.php
*#*:* Any typepad blog. See for instance the categories here http://ideasinfood.typepad.com/ideas_in_food/
*#*:* Eventful. http://eventful.com/
*#*:* WordPress blogs, default permalink structure (http://example.com/?cat=N). Pretty permalinks (http://example.com/category/<tagname>) are supported through various methods, but cannot be enabled by default due to technical variances in web servers and setups. The rigidity of the spec has set a high technical barrier to entry. Even if the category name were put into the URL, it would have to be in the querystring for default WordPress setups, which isn't supported in the spec. A querystring fallback (?tag=<tagname>) would enable many more systems to use rel-tag. --[[User:MarkJaquith|MarkJaquith]] 15:39, 20 Oct 2006 (PDT)

* {{OpenIssue}} 2006-04-06 raised by [[User:Evan|Evan]]
*# ''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.''
*# In most sites that support tagging, the association is done visually. There isn't any semantic markup that would tie the tag to the "id" attribute of the content being tagged. XML has "ref-id" attribute, which can be used. Not sure if it should be made part of the rel-tag standard though. [[User:Bloritsch|Bloritsch]] 18:26, 17 July 2009 (UTC)

* {{OpenIssue}} 2006-11-24 raised by [[User:AndyMabbett|Andy Mabbett]]
*# 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:

<pre><nowiki>
<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>
[...]
</nowiki></pre>

*# Isn't this a major departure from how tags are used across different sites? When I click on a tag link, I expect to see other content that applies that tag. [[User:Bloritsch|Bloritsch]] 18:26, 17 July 2009 (UTC)

* {{OpenIssue}} 2006-11-25 raised by [[User:AndyMabbett|Andy Mabbett]]
*#Caution should be advised when recommending Wikipedia as a name-space. For example, an article about Birmingham, Alabama, tagged with a link to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birmingham would link to an article about Birmingham, England. Similarly, a tag using http://wikitravel.org/en/Newcastle will link to a disambiguation page.

* {{OpenIssue}} 2006-11-26 raised by [[User:AndyMabbett|Andy Mabbett]]
*#There is a danger of encouraging users to breach [http://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG10/wai-pageauth.html#tech-meaningful-links WCAG 1.0 priority 2 guideline 13.6] "'''Clearly identify the target of each link'''". If a page has a link thus <code><a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk">BBC</a></code>, tagging it with a link thus <code><a href="http://www.example.com/BBC" rel="tag">BBC</a></code> will result in two links on the page, both labelled "BBC", with different targets.
*#Typically tags are kept in one location on a screen so that visually they have a context--this provides disambiguation for seeing users. However, this practice does not address usability for people dependent on screen readers.[[User:Bloritsch|Bloritsch]] 18:26, 17 July 2009 (UTC)

*{{OpenIssue}} 2007-01-01 raised Jan 2006 by Ben Buchanan as [http://weblog.200ok.com.au/2006/01/limitations-of-rel-microformat.html limitations of rel="tag" microformat]
*#Summary: Under the current draft, tags and relevant tagspaces are potentially hard to create; and it's still easy to abuse the system. Humans can still be tricked and so can the machines. It's a great spec if you happen to have a compliant directory structure, but if your site doesn't match then you either recreate your entire system... or, more likely, you sadly advise the client that tags aren't happening.

* {{OpenIssue}} 2007-02-03 raised by [[User:Evan|Evan]]
*#There may be value in adopting, supporting or commenting on the [http://www.flickr.com/groups/api/discuss/72157594497877875/ machine tags] format in use at [http://flickr.com/ Flickr]. Machine tags (also called [http://geobloggers.com/archives/2007/01/24/offtopic-ish-flickr-ramps-up-triple-tag-support/ triple tags]) are a structured tag format with the syntax "''namespace'':''property''=''value''". Examples: "geo:city=Portland". It's not clear how machine tags interact with other microformats ("geo:long=..." and "geo:lat=..." are two commonly-used examples, which clearly overlaps with [[geo]]), whether other sites and services will support machine tags, and how to include them here.

== Need reformatting ==

These issues were mistakenly added to the [[rel-tag-faq]] and should have been put here in the first place. They need to be reformatted as issues.

===Are tags case sensitive?===
*Are tags case sensitive? Is "Dog" the same tag as "dog" and "DOG"?

===Multi-word tags===
*How should a multi-word tag be made? For instance, if using Wikipedia as a name space, a page about a Black Redstart (a bird) would be tagged '''Black_Redstart''', with an underscore [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Redstart]. Is there any way of aliasing alternatives ("BlackRedstart", "Black-Redstart", etc.)? Is any particular format preferable?

==Related pages==
{{rel-tag-related-pages}}

rel-tag-faq

2009-07-17T18:42:09Z

Bloritsch:

= rel-tag frequently asked questions =

This document serves to answer and discuss frequently asked questions specifically about the [[rel-tag]] microformat. You may want to read the [[rel-faq]] first as it answers many common questions about the HTML4 "rel" and "rev" attributes, and their linktype values. If you have a new question to ask, first consider asking on the [http://microformats.org/mailman/listinfo/microformats-discuss/ microformats-discuss list].

== Q&A ==

# ''Where does a tagging link belong? Does the tagging link only need to appear in my Web feed (RSS / Atom)? Does the tagging link need to appear on the page where my specific blog entry lies? Does the tagging link need to appear everywhere that I can possibly imagine?''
#* In short, tagging links belong in all the places and formats in which you published tagged content. The Web page is the primary location where users read content and where search engines index. Thus the Web page is a place where you should absolutely include your [[rel-tag]] links. To tag your blog posts, put the [[rel-tag]] links inside them, visibly. The Web feeds are simply alternate ways of publishing your blog posts, and thus should include the full content of your blog posts, [[rel-tag]] links intact.
# ''Where shouldn't I use rel-tag?''
#* rel-tag expresses a particular relationship (a) between the page you are on and (b) the target of a link. If you're not asserting this relationship, don't use rel-tag. In particular:
#** don't use rel-tag in [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tag_cloud Tag Clouds]
#** don't use rel-tag to refer to the pages http://www.technorati.com/tag/xyz, http://del.icio.us/tag/xyz, http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/xyz/ (and so forth) if you're not asserting "this page is tagged 'xyz'"
# ''The format specifies that the tag must "come after the last / in the path". Will something like <code><nowiki>http://example.com/index.php/TAG</nowiki></code> work? Or does it have to be a "real" directory or [http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.2/mod/mod_rewrite.html mod_rewrite]? -- [[User:Singpolyma|singpolyma]] 23:51, 24 Jan 2006 (PST)''
#* The key is the URL. Whether that URL is generated from a database or a directory does not matter. The URL matters.
#** My question, however, was about whether that URL form ( <code><nowiki>http://example.com/index.php/TAG</nowiki></code> ) would be valid, since there is the dot in "index.php".
#*** Yes, the URL in the example is valid (or legal or conformant or whatever you want to call it to minimize confusion). The dot (period, full stop, U+002E) is free to appear in most places in a URL, even in the middle of a path-segment that is not the last path-segment. (The latest specification for URLs, "[http://gbiv.com/protocols/uri/rfc/rfc3986.html Uniform Resource Identifier (URI): Generic Syntax]", is RFC 3986.)
# ''I'm developing a web application which uses tagging, and so of course I want to use [[rel-tag]]. For this application, I want nice, clean URLs. I was planning to use [http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.2/mod/mod_rewrite.html mod_rewrite] to map a clean URL onto my underlying scripts. How do I use Apache's [http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.2/mod/mod_rewrite.html mod_rewrite] to map <code><nowiki>http://example.org/~user/app/tag/car</nowiki></code> to <code><nowiki>http://example.org/~user/app/script.php?tag=car</nowiki></code> ?''
#* One solution involves changing the script to inspect the path for the tag (via the variable "PATH_INFO"), rather than inspecting the query:
<pre><nowiki><Directory "/home/user/public_html/app/>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^tag/([^/]+)$ script.php/$1 [last]
</Directory></nowiki></pre>
#* For people who can edit the server's main configuration file, the following untested configuration code may work. Corrections are welcome.
<pre><nowiki>RewriteEngine On
RewriteMap tag int:escape
RewriteRule ^/~user/app/tag/([^/]+)$ /~user/app/script.php?tag=${tag:$1} [last]</nowiki></pre>
#* The following configuration code, left over from a previous contribution to this document, does a poor job according to tests. The following code fails to enforce the [[rel-tag]] rules about the tag corresponding to the last non-empty path-segment. The following code fails to transcode the tag for safe use in the URL query. Consider that a request on <code><nowiki>http://example.org/~user/app/tag/</nowiki></code> would map internally to a request on <code><nowiki>http://example.org/~user/app/script.php?tag=</nowiki></code> . Consider that a request on <code><nowiki>http://example.org/~user/app/tag/not-a-tag/the-tag</nowiki></code> would map internally to a request on <code><nowiki>http://example.org/~user/app/script.php?tag=not-a-tag/the-tag</nowiki></code> . Consider that a request on <code><nowiki>http://example.org/~user/app/tag/the-tag/</nowiki></code> would map internally to a request on <code><nowiki>http://example.org/~user/app/script.php?tag=the-tag/</nowiki></code> . Consider that a request on <code><nowiki>http://example.org/~user/app/tag/attack&intent=destroy</nowiki></code> would map internally to a request on <code><nowiki>http://example.org/~user/app/script.php?tag=attack&intent=destroy</nowiki></code> .
<pre><nowiki><Directory "/home/user/public_html/app/>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^tag/(.*)$ script.php?tag=$1
</Directory></nowiki></pre>
<ol start="4">
<li>''Does a rel tag still have meaning if the link redirects? If the HTTP server returns a 302 status code, does the rel-tag have meaning? Is there a formal rule that indexers should follow the link to the final, resolved destination? Or is there a formal rule that a rel tag should be ignored if URL of its link does not return a status code of 200?''
* Only the linked URL is important. The document specified by the URL, including any HTTP headers it contains are irrelevant. The whole point of rel-tag is that user-agents can figure out the name of the tag from the URL without having to make a request for the page linked to. [[User:TobyInk|TobyInk]] 03:56, 10 Aug 2007 (PDT)
</li>
</ol>

===CSS selector===
*How do you write a CSS selector for rel-tag?
** <code>a[rel~="tag"] { color: green }</code>

===Are tags case sensitive?===
*Are tags case sensitive. Is "Dog" the same tag as "dog" and "DOG"?
**{{AwaitingAnswer}}
**That's a conscious design decision for your site. Sites like Flickr intentionally normalize the tag name to reduce the possibility of multiple tags that mean the same thing. The name of the tag is more important than how it is displayed.

===Multi-word tags===
*How should a multi-word tag be made? For instance, if using Wikipedia as a name space, a page about a Black Redstart (a bird) would be tagged '''Black_Redstart''', with an underscore [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Redstart]. Is there any way of aliasing alternatives ("BlackRedstart", "Black-Redstart", etc.)? Is any particular format preferable?
** Existing bevavior
*** delicious supports combined tags
*** flickr supports multi-word tags with spaces but collapses spaces when searching
*** ma.gnolia supports multi-word tags with spaces
*** technorati supports multi-word tags with spaces
**{{AwaitingAnswer}}

===Tags with file extensions===
*Is <code><a rel="tag" href="<nowiki>http://example.com/cheese.htm</nowiki>">cheese</a></code> a valid tag for "cheese"? Ditto ".asp" or ".php" variants? If not, why not?

Any file-name extension in the last path segment is part of the tag value:

*<nowiki>http://example.com/cheese.htm</nowiki> ⇒ cheese.htm
*<nowiki>http://example.com/cheese.asp</nowiki> ⇒ cheese.asp
*<nowiki>http://example.com/cheese.php</nowiki> ⇒ cheese.php

The [[rel-tag|rel-tag specification]] is clear on how to extract a tag from a URL. Special treatment for file-name extensions is not part of the extraction. Brian Suda gave an [http://microformats.org/discuss/mail/microformats-discuss/2007-February/008538.html explanation on the microformats-discuss list]. Consider the following URLs, the tags that the following URLs give under the current specification, and the effect of requiring special treatment for file-name extensions on the tags that the following URLs give.

*http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.htaccess
*http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.Net
*http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/India.Arie
*http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASN.1
*[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L.I.E. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L.I.E.]

===What about Scope?===
Since rel-tag is a feature used in many other microformats, the question often arises: "What is the scope of the tag?" For instance, a rel-tag may appear inside of an [[xfolk xFolk]] entry and on first glance it may appear that the tag should only apply to that entry. However, current publishing practice seems to indicate anything appearing on a page is likely related to the content of the page. Therefore, the interpretation is that not only does the rel-tag apply its direct container but to all containers and to the document as a whole; it contains the xFolk entry. This is a departure from strict knowledge theory in favor of real-world usage.

As another example, you may link to your friend Joe with XFN and hCard, indicating in his categories that Joe is interested in swimming, which you loathe. Since the article is primarily about you and not about Joe's hobbies and because the rel-tag is inside an hCard, you may expect that the rel-tag does not apply to the document; however, the document does contain information about swimming, albeit tiny, namely that your friend likes it. In this way, rel-tag is binary: it indicates direction (yes or no) but not magnitude. This equivalent to a free-text search sans [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/tf-idf tf-idf]]; i.e. without a notion of term relevance.

The upshot of this is that rel-tags can have downward scope but not upward scope.

===Encoding and decoding the tag text in JavaScript===
If you want to get the text of the tag using JavaScript, you should use decodeURIComponent() to get a text representation of the tag, not escape. decodeURIComponent will properly handle UTF-8.

==Related pages==
{{rel-tag-related-pages}}
**{{AwaitingAnswer}}

rel-tag-issues

2009-07-17T18:26:58Z

Bloritsch:

= 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. — [http://tantek.com/log/ Tantek]

== Issues ==

{{issues-format}}

* {{OpenIssue}} 2007-03-28 raised by [[User:JamesCraig|James Craig]]
*# [[internationalization|Internationalization]] (i18n) issue with restful tag spaces. Restful tag spaces cannot be used with non-western characters unless escaped in unicode, which renders a restful tag space quite pointless. For example:
*#*A Japanese Katakana tag ピフ would have to be <nowiki>http://example.com/tags/%E3%83%94%E3%83%95/</nowiki>
*#*A Hindi Devanagri tag चट would have to be <nowiki>http://example.com/tags/%E0%A4%9A%E0%A4%9F/</nowiki>
::There should be another way to specify the human-readable tagname.

* {{OpenIssue}} 2007-01-10 raised by [[User:AndyMabbett|Andy Mabbett]]
*# I recently received an e-mail circular, asking that images and blog posts about a particular event be tagged in the style:

::20070110 AB123YZ postcode:uk=AB123YZ upcoming:id=123456 upcoming:event=19876 upcoming:venue=14567 url=example.com geocoded geotagged geo:lat=52.3456 geo:lon=-1.2345

:Is any work being done, to document such tag "schema"? [[User:AndyMabbett|Andy Mabbett]] 12:43, 10 Jan 2007 (PST)

: Isn't that several different tags? I.e. "20070110", "AB123YZ", "postcode:uk=AB123YZ" .... At least this is how a site like Flickr would decipher it. The rel-tag standard handles each one separately, although the "machine tags" (as Flickr calls them) have the same issues as the i18n issue above. [[User:Bloritsch|Bloritsch]] 18:00, 17 July 2009 (UTC)

* {{OpenIssue}} 2005-06-21 raised by Hixie
*# ''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?
*# ''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?
*#* Tags are used for various reasons, including the ability to re-find information later. Free text search has its own issues, including raising the signal to noise ratio of search results.

* 2006-01-10 raised by Adam Willard
*# ''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. --[[User:RyanKing|RyanKing]] 14:46, 25 Jan 2006 (PST) (@TODO)
*# ''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 aren't as lucky to have Mod Rewrite.''
*#* REJECTED IRRELEVANT - Implementing a tagspace is well outside the bounds of the rel-tag specification. --[[User:RyanKing|RyanKing]] 14:46, 25 Jan 2006 (PST)

* 2006-02-09 raised by JonathanFeinberg
*# ''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.
*# ''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]].
*# ''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
*# ''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>'? --[[User:RyanKing|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.
*#*:* O'Reilly.com. See the tags at this url http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2004/11/10/delicious.html note: O'Reilly uses javascript and AJAX to populate the content on page. This is definitely not standard.
*#*:* Dodgeball. http://boston.dodgeball.com/tags.php
*#*:* Any typepad blog. See for instance the categories here http://ideasinfood.typepad.com/ideas_in_food/
*#*:* Eventful. http://eventful.com/
*#*:* WordPress blogs, default permalink structure (http://example.com/?cat=N). Pretty permalinks (http://example.com/category/<tagname>) are supported through various methods, but cannot be enabled by default due to technical variances in web servers and setups. The rigidity of the spec has set a high technical barrier to entry. Even if the category name were put into the URL, it would have to be in the querystring for default WordPress setups, which isn't supported in the spec. A querystring fallback (?tag=<tagname>) would enable many more systems to use rel-tag. --[[User:MarkJaquith|MarkJaquith]] 15:39, 20 Oct 2006 (PDT)

* {{OpenIssue}} 2006-04-06 raised by [[User:Evan|Evan]]
*# ''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.''
*# In most sites that support tagging, the association is done visually. There isn't any semantic markup that would tie the tag to the "id" attribute of the content being tagged. XML has "ref-id" attribute, which can be used. Not sure if it should be made part of the rel-tag standard though. [[User:Bloritsch|Bloritsch]] 18:26, 17 July 2009 (UTC)

* {{OpenIssue}} 2006-11-24 raised by [[User:AndyMabbett|Andy Mabbett]]
*# 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:

<pre><nowiki>
<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>
[...]
</nowiki></pre>

*# Isn't this a major departure from how tags are used across different sites? When I click on a tag link, I expect to see other content that applies that tag. [[User:Bloritsch|Bloritsch]] 18:26, 17 July 2009 (UTC)

* {{OpenIssue}} 2006-11-25 raised by [[User:AndyMabbett|Andy Mabbett]]
*#Caution should be advised when recommending Wikipedia as a name-space. For example, an article about Birmingham, Alabama, tagged with a link to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birmingham would link to an article about Birmingham, England. Similarly, a tag using http://wikitravel.org/en/Newcastle will link to a disambiguation page.

* {{OpenIssue}} 2006-11-26 raised by [[User:AndyMabbett|Andy Mabbett]]
*#There is a danger of encouraging users to breach [http://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG10/wai-pageauth.html#tech-meaningful-links WCAG 1.0 priority 2 guideline 13.6] "'''Clearly identify the target of each link'''". If a page has a link thus <code><a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk">BBC</a></code>, tagging it with a link thus <code><a href="http://www.example.com/BBC" rel="tag">BBC</a></code> will result in two links on the page, both labelled "BBC", with different targets.
*#Typically tags are kept in one location on a screen so that visually they have a context--this provides disambiguation for seeing users. However, this practice does not address usability for people dependent on screen readers.[[User:Bloritsch|Bloritsch]] 18:26, 17 July 2009 (UTC)

*{{OpenIssue}} 2007-01-01 raised Jan 2006 by Ben Buchanan as [http://weblog.200ok.com.au/2006/01/limitations-of-rel-microformat.html limitations of rel="tag" microformat]
*#Summary: Under the current draft, tags and relevant tagspaces are potentially hard to create; and it's still easy to abuse the system. Humans can still be tricked and so can the machines. It's a great spec if you happen to have a compliant directory structure, but if your site doesn't match then you either recreate your entire system... or, more likely, you sadly advise the client that tags aren't happening.

* {{OpenIssue}} 2007-02-03 raised by [[User:Evan|Evan]]
*#There may be value in adopting, supporting or commenting on the [http://www.flickr.com/groups/api/discuss/72157594497877875/ machine tags] format in use at [http://flickr.com/ Flickr]. Machine tags (also called [http://geobloggers.com/archives/2007/01/24/offtopic-ish-flickr-ramps-up-triple-tag-support/ triple tags]) are a structured tag format with the syntax "''namespace'':''property''=''value''". Examples: "geo:city=Portland". It's not clear how machine tags interact with other microformats ("geo:long=..." and "geo:lat=..." are two commonly-used examples, which clearly overlaps with [[geo]]), whether other sites and services will support machine tags, and how to include them here.

== Need reformatting ==

These issues were mistakenly added to the [[rel-tag-faq]] and should have been put here in the first place. They need to be reformatted as issues.

===Are tags case sensitive?===
*Are tags case sensitive? Is "Dog" the same tag as "dog" and "DOG"?

===Multi-word tags===
*How should a multi-word tag be made? For instance, if using Wikipedia as a name space, a page about a Black Redstart (a bird) would be tagged '''Black_Redstart''', with an underscore [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Redstart]. Is there any way of aliasing alternatives ("BlackRedstart", "Black-Redstart", etc.)? Is any particular format preferable?

==Related pages==
{{rel-tag-related-pages}}

rel-tag-issues

2009-07-17T18:00:39Z

Bloritsch: /* relTag Issues */

= 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. — [http://tantek.com/log/ Tantek]

== Issues ==

{{issues-format}}

* {{OpenIssue}} 2007-03-28 raised by [[User:JamesCraig|James Craig]]
*# [[internationalization|Internationalization]] (i18n) issue with restful tag spaces. Restful tag spaces cannot be used with non-western characters unless escaped in unicode, which renders a restful tag space quite pointless. For example:
*#*A Japanese Katakana tag ピフ would have to be <nowiki>http://example.com/tags/%E3%83%94%E3%83%95/</nowiki>
*#*A Hindi Devanagri tag चट would have to be <nowiki>http://example.com/tags/%E0%A4%9A%E0%A4%9F/</nowiki>
::There should be another way to specify the human-readable tagname.

* {{OpenIssue}} 2007-01-10 raised by [[User:AndyMabbett|Andy Mabbett]]
*# I recently received an e-mail circular, asking that images and blog posts about a particular event be tagged in the style:

::20070110 AB123YZ postcode:uk=AB123YZ upcoming:id=123456 upcoming:event=19876 upcoming:venue=14567 url=example.com geocoded geotagged geo:lat=52.3456 geo:lon=-1.2345

:Is any work being done, to document such tag "schema"? [[User:AndyMabbett|Andy Mabbett]] 12:43, 10 Jan 2007 (PST)

: Isn't that several different tags? I.e. "20070110", "AB123YZ", "postcode:uk=AB123YZ" .... At least this is how a site like Flickr would decipher it. The rel-tag standard handles each one separately, although the "machine tags" (as Flickr calls them) have the same issues as the i18n issue above. [[User:Bloritsch|Bloritsch]] 18:00, 17 July 2009 (UTC)

* {{OpenIssue}} 2005-06-21 raised by Hixie
*# ''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?
*# ''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
*# ''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. --[[User:RyanKing|RyanKing]] 14:46, 25 Jan 2006 (PST) (@TODO)
*# ''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 aren't as lucky to have Mod Rewrite.''
*#* REJECTED IRRELEVANT - Implementing a tagspace is well outside the bounds of the rel-tag specification. --[[User:RyanKing|RyanKing]] 14:46, 25 Jan 2006 (PST)

* 2006-02-09 raised by JonathanFeinberg
*# ''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.
*# ''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]].
*# ''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
*# ''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>'? --[[User:RyanKing|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.
*#*:* O'Reilly.com. See the tags at this url http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2004/11/10/delicious.html
*#*:* Dodgeball. http://boston.dodgeball.com/tags.php
*#*:* Any typepad blog. See for instance the categories here http://ideasinfood.typepad.com/ideas_in_food/
*#*:* Eventful. http://eventful.com/
*#*:* WordPress blogs, default permalink structure (http://example.com/?cat=N). Pretty permalinks (http://example.com/category/<tagname>) are supported through various methods, but cannot be enabled by default due to technical variances in web servers and setups. The rigidity of the spec has set a high technical barrier to entry. Even if the category name were put into the URL, it would have to be in the querystring for default WordPress setups, which isn't supported in the spec. A querystring fallback (?tag=<tagname>) would enable many more systems to use rel-tag. --[[User:MarkJaquith|MarkJaquith]] 15:39, 20 Oct 2006 (PDT)

* {{OpenIssue}} 2006-04-06 raised by [[User:Evan|Evan]]
*# ''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.''

* {{OpenIssue}} 2006-11-24 raised by [[User:AndyMabbett|Andy Mabbett]]
*# 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:

<pre><nowiki>
<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>
[...]
</nowiki></pre>

* {{OpenIssue}} 2006-11-25 raised by [[User:AndyMabbett|Andy Mabbett]]
*#Caution should be advised when recommending Wikipedia as a name-space. For example, an article about Birmingham, Alabama, tagged with a link to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birmingham would link to an article about Birmingham, England. Similarly, a tag using http://wikitravel.org/en/Newcastle will link to a disambiguation page.

* {{OpenIssue}} 2006-11-26 raised by [[User:AndyMabbett|Andy Mabbett]]
*#There is a danger of encouraging users to breach [http://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG10/wai-pageauth.html#tech-meaningful-links WCAG 1.0 priority 2 guideline 13.6] "'''Clearly identify the target of each link'''". If a page has a link thus <code><a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk">BBC</a></code>, tagging it with a link thus <code><a href="http://www.example.com/BBC" rel="tag">BBC</a></code> will result in two links on the page, both labelled "BBC", with different targets.

*{{OpenIssue}} 2007-01-01 raised Jan 2006 by Ben Buchanan as [http://weblog.200ok.com.au/2006/01/limitations-of-rel-microformat.html limitations of rel="tag" microformat]
*#Summary: Under the current draft, tags and relevant tagspaces are potentially hard to create; and it's still easy to abuse the system. Humans can still be tricked and so can the machines. It's a great spec if you happen to have a compliant directory structure, but if your site doesn't match then you either recreate your entire system... or, more likely, you sadly advise the client that tags aren't happening.

* {{OpenIssue}} 2007-02-03 raised by [[User:Evan|Evan]]
*#There may be value in adopting, supporting or commenting on the [http://www.flickr.com/groups/api/discuss/72157594497877875/ machine tags] format in use at [http://flickr.com/ Flickr]. Machine tags (also called [http://geobloggers.com/archives/2007/01/24/offtopic-ish-flickr-ramps-up-triple-tag-support/ triple tags]) are a structured tag format with the syntax "''namespace'':''property''=''value''". Examples: "geo:city=Portland". It's not clear how machine tags interact with other microformats ("geo:long=..." and "geo:lat=..." are two commonly-used examples, which clearly overlaps with [[geo]]), whether other sites and services will support machine tags, and how to include them here.

== Need reformatting ==

These issues were mistakenly added to the [[rel-tag-faq]] and should have been put here in the first place. They need to be reformatted as issues.

===Are tags case sensitive?===
*Are tags case sensitive? Is "Dog" the same tag as "dog" and "DOG"?

===Multi-word tags===
*How should a multi-word tag be made? For instance, if using Wikipedia as a name space, a page about a Black Redstart (a bird) would be tagged '''Black_Redstart''', with an underscore [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Redstart]. Is there any way of aliasing alternatives ("BlackRedstart", "Black-Redstart", etc.)? Is any particular format preferable?

==Related pages==
{{rel-tag-related-pages}}