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Anyone here that uses it for anything else? How prevelant is its use on the web outside stylesheets?
For example, Lynx has always used
<link rev="made" href="mailto:user@example.com">
for its "send a comment to the page owner" function. Lynx also turns some of the other useful values (like "Home" and "Search") into links at the top of a page.
After stylesheets, the most popular use of LINK is to point to favicons using the format <link rel="shortcut icon" href="favicon.ico"> . MSIE and Mozilla both use that, but use it differently. MSIE still only calls the icon if you bookmark the page, Mozilla calls it whenever you visit the page. (Really Pedantic Note: The value "shortcut icon" would be illegal in HTML 2.0, because HTML 2.0 declares the datatype for REL/REV as NAMES, meaning spaces are used to separate multiple values of the attribute. HTML 3.2 and above changes REL/REV to CDATA datatype, allowing spaces. I never agreed with that change.)
I think some search robots have started following LINK elments. I recently added some rel="alternate" links pointing from the HTML version of certain pages to their HDML equivilents, and ia_archiver snarfed the HDML pages a week later. So far as I know, there are no "normal" links on the web pointing to those pages. (HDML is a dead language. I only added the LINK links because I was being fussy.)
<link rel="next" href="next_page.html">
An alternative to preload JavaScripts, the tag placed in the <head> will help to load the next page more quickly.
Do you know what versions of MSIE support this?
Sorry Joshie, don't know but I started using the LINK tag in this way at the end of '98.
Just to clarify, I use the term "preload" very loosely and am not sure if the browser actually downloads the specified file or whether it just finds the path. Whichever, it does make a significant difference in load time when that next file is bloated. And it only can be used, in this way, once per page.
