LINK support arrives in Mozilla

[Thomas Dowling]

Back in July, I posted a message about support for the HTML 2 LINK
element in Mozilla (archived at <http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/Web4Lib/
archive/0107/0052.html>).  As a quick recap, LINK provides a set of
relationships between the current document and other documents--
next, prev, up, etc.--in a browser-parsable mechanism that can be
used to create navigational links as part of the browser's user
interface, in addition to any links that are part of the page.  IMO,
the advantages to using LINK are that links to related documents are
equally available from all parts of a page, and (if used throughout
a site) completely consistent from one page to another, and in fact
from one site to another.  The only problem is that no major browser
ever implemented it.

Last week a post on the netscape.public.mozilla.ui newsgroup
announced:

  > After 2 Years, 8 Months, 3 Days, 2 Bugs, 61 Votes, 56 CCs, 116
  > Newsgroup Postings, 451 Bug Comments, and 28 Patches, the fix for
  > bug 87428, "No UI HTML <link> element", has finally been checked
  > in.


After some "it's in, it's out, it's in again" uncertainty, this
feature is now part of the Mozilla daily builds, under the name
"Site Navigation Toolbar".

You really have to dig at the moment to find out what link
relationships are supported.  I found this at
<http://www.mozillazine.org/talkback.html?article=2042&message=
141#141>:

  The link toolbar picks up the "rel" attributes of <link>
  elements (<link rev="made"> is also grandfathered in). Right
  now, we assign "home", "start", "top", and "origin" to the
  "top" button, "up" and "parent" to the "up" button, "begin"
  and "first" to the "first" button, "next" and "child" to the
  "next" button, "prev" and "previous" to the "prev" button,
  "end" and "last" to the "last" button. The "Document" and
  "Other" menus will probably be combined soon, so I won't go
  into them; suffice it to say that rel="stylesheet" and
  rel="icon" or "shortcut icon" are filtered, but any other
  values of "rel" will appear in the menu.


This should be in the Mozilla 0.9.5 milestone release, and there's a
possibility that it will make the next Netscape upgrade, so now
would be a good time to play with it and start writing LINKs into
your pages.


Thomas Dowling
OhioLINK - Ohio Library and Information Network
tdowling at ohiolink.edu