rel="shortlink" - Microformats Wiki (original) (raw)

Specification 2009-05-04

Editors

Concept

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Patents

This specification is subject to a royalty free patent policy, e.g. per the W3C Patent Policy, and IETF RFC3667 & RFC3668.

Abstract

RelShortLink is a brainstorm proposal with the goal of becoming an elemental microformat.

The problem-space that rel-shortlink is attempting to solve is being taken through the microformats process, and this is the current brainstorm that seems to make more sense than the alternatives. Nonetheless, additional background documentation is needed at the following stub pages:

Proposed usage: by adding rel="shortlink" to a [hyper]link, a page indicates that the hyperlink may be used for space constrained and/or manual entry (e.g. printed or spoken) applications and that the destination of that hyperlink carries the same meaning (even if formatting such as sort order and hightlighting is lost). Typical use cases include pasting links into microblogging services such as Twitter and anywhere manual entry is required (e.g. printed or spoken URLs).

Additional variants: (these should probably be further documented on shortlink-brainstorming)

Examples

HTML

On a page like http://www.flickr.com/photos/tantek/3909804165/ it could have HTML to indicate a shortlink in one of two ways:

and/or

shortlink: http://flic.kr/p/6XuLyD

HTTP

In addition, a request for a page like http://www.flickr.com/photos/tantek/3909804165/ should return as part of the HTTP headers:

Link: http://flic.kr/p/6XuLyD; rel="shortlink"

XMDP profile

rel

HTML4 definition of the 'rel' attribute. Here is an additional value.

shortlink
Indicates that the referred resource carries the same meaning as the referring page (even if formatting such as sort order and highlighting is lost) and that the link may be used for space constrained and/or manual entry (e.g. printed or spoken) applications.

examples in the wild

This section is informative and in alphabetical order.

Note: There are numerous uses of rel-shortlink in the wild, this is very much an incomplete list. If your site marked up with rel-shortlink, feel free to add it to the top of this list. Once the list grows too big, we'll make a separate wiki page (rel-shortlink-examples-in-wild).

normative references

informative references

inferior alternatives