The <link> Tag

[sorry.no.email]

Hi,

I have just finished adding a series of link (head) tags to my
father's family history site:

http://people.aapt.net.au/~adjlstrong/strongs/chapter_8.html

The tags are:

<link href="chapter_7.html" rel="prev" />
<link href="chapter_9.html" rel="next" />

I suspect that it will make no difference but should the first tag
actually be:

<link href="chapter_7.html" rev="prev" />

Thanks for any advice,

Andrew.

 

[Steve Pugh]

I have just finished adding a series of link (head) tags to my
father's family history site:

http://people.aapt.net.au/~adjlstrong/strongs/chapter_8.html

The tags are:

<link href="chapter_7.html" rel="prev" />
<link href="chapter_9.html" rel="next" />

I suspect that it will make no difference but should the first tag
actually be:

<link href="chapter_7.html" rev="prev" />

No.
rev="rev" would mean that Chapter 8 is the previous page to Chapter 7
which is not usually the case.

Rev and rel work like this.

If A has a rel="foo" with respect to B
Then B has a rev="foo" with respect to A.

So in your original example, you could write
<link href="chapter_7.html" rel="prev" rev="next" />
<link href="chapter_9.html" rel="next" rev="prev" />

As Chapter 7 is previous to Chapter 8, and hence the reverse is true:
Chapter 8 is next to Chapter 7. Likewse, Chapter 9 is next to Chapter
8 and the reverse is that Chapter 8 is previous to Chapter 9.

However, other than rev="made" there is no support at all for rev
values so you might as well forget them entirely.

Steve

 

[Marc]

<link href="chapter_7.html" rel="prev" rev="next" />
<link href="chapter_9.html" rel="next" rev="prev" />

As Chapter 7 is previous to Chapter 8, and hence the reverse is true:
Chapter 8 is next to Chapter 7. Likewse, Chapter 9 is next to Chapter
8 and the reverse is that Chapter 8 is previous to Chapter 9.

However, other than rev="made" there is no support at all for rev
values so you might as well forget them entirely.

What is the point in these next page and last page links - do they aid
search engines?

Marc

 

[Steve Pugh]

What is the point in these next page and last page links - do they aid
search engines?

They are use to provide standardised navgation bars in many browsers
(natively in, for example, Opera, Mozilla, Lynx and Safari and via
extensions in irefox and IE). And also trigger some browser specific
behaviour (e.g. Opera uses links marked as rel="next" in its Fast
Forward feature and some other browsers feth and pre-cache similarly
marked pages).

I have no idea whether search engines do anything with them. I suspect
not, as spammers would use them to link to pages via a mechanism that
many users (IE and Firefox users without the add on) wouldn't see.

Steve

 

[Andy Dingley]

What is the point in these next page and last page links - do they aid
search engines?

Not really - any more than any other linkage.

What they're good for is with a smart browser that recognises them and
pulls the links out onto a toolbar (there are some Firefox extensions
that do this, and a number of phone browsers do it onto physical
buttons). This is a really nice way to navigate through a multi-page
site, because you're using the same button for every link, for every
site. This is a UI feature that the user can customise to be
consistent, i.e. same button, same toolbar for every site.

It's a feature well worth implementing.

OTOH, most of the extensions I've seen that support this also need to
support sites that don't provide these links - so they also have
scanners that scan the page and look for <a> links with text that
suggests they might be the "next page" link. It's still a great
feature, but the UI's work-around means that the "properly done"
version doesn't actually work that much better than the simpler version.