Henri Sivonen wrote:
Andreas Prilop <nh******@rrzn-user.uni-hannover.de> wrote:
What exactly are Chapters and Sections in the <LINK REL=...>
tag?
Are there any good examples?
I am aware of one example:
http://ethesis.helsinki.fi/julkaisut.../eiookaht.html
It's a simple example: a page that acts as a table of content for some
material (a master's thesis), containing a normal list of links to
next-level pages - and with these links duplicated as <link
rel="chapter" ...> elements.
The <link> elements are thus redundant, and most users will not notice
their presence in any way. If you use Mozilla (the beast, not Firefox),
you can (if you have Site Navigation Bar enabled) click on the button
"Document" to see a menu with entries "Chapters" and "Appendices"
enabled, and under "Chapters" you can find the same links as on the
page. I fail to see the usefulness of this duplication.
If the <link> elements specified _sections_ as well (pointing to
second-level headings on each subpage), they would have some added
value: you could get directly to section 1.3 from the main page, even
though the table of content on the page is one-level only. I wonder how
many people would use that, though.
On the (even) more theoretical side, it seems that the concepts of
"chapter" and "section" have not been defined well in the HTML
specifications. Generally, the specs are rather implicit about the
meanings of rel="..." values. The most reasonable interpretation is that
rel="chapter" and rel="section" imply the existence of a composite,
book-like document, which normally consists of several pages (though it
could be a single page), and rel="chapter" refers to a major (top-level)
structural part of a document, whereas rel="section" refers to a
second-level structural part (component of a chapter).
On the page Andreas mentioned,
http://www.unics.uni-hannover.de/nht...onal-text.html
(which is, by the way, worth reading to anyone who needs to know about
directional text in HTML)
I think the <link rel="chapter" ...> elements are correct by any
reasonable criteria, and marginally useful: a user who can make use of
them can access the table of content, which does not exist on the page
itself. On the other hand, it might be better to include the table of
content explicitly, e.g. as a floating box on the right (which is the
way I favor these days - it provides an overview without disturbing too
much those people who just want to get started with the content, I think).
The parts of Andreas' page are short and surely not like chapters in a
book, so someone might say they are sections, or even subsections. This
really depends on the terminology used, and the terminology may vary by
the type of publication. This is one reason why "chapter" and "section"
are vague values.
