Re: <link rel="next"> element does not match Next hyperlink

[Gavin Smith]

On Thu, Nov 07, 2019 at 03:07:46PM +0100, Patrice Dumas wrote:
> I think that it is indeed deliberate, based on my interepretation of
> some description of the links in head specification.  Based on that
> description (I don't remember where it was), I used the following 
> directions for the links:
> 
>   'LINKS_BUTTONS'        => ['Top', 'Index', 'Contents', 'About',
>                               'NodeUp', 'NextFile', 'PrevFile'],
> 
> 'NextFile' will be associated to 'next' in rel.
> 
> In the nodes directions hrefs, the directions are different, typically 
> 
>   'SECTION_BUTTONS'      => [[ 'NodeNext', \&_default_node_direction ],
>                              [ 'NodePrev', \&_default_node_direction ],
>                              [ 'NodeUp', \&_default_node_direction ], ' ',
>                              'Contents', 'Index'],
> 
> and in that case it is 'NodeNext' that will be associated to 'next' in
> rel. 

Okay, thanks for the reply.  I can see that it was a deliberate decision.

There is a link in the source to 
https://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/types.html#type-links, which contains:

> Next
> Refers to the next document in a linear sequence of documents. User 
> agents may choose to preload the "next" document, to reduce the 
> perceived load time.
> Prev
> Refers to the previous document in an ordered series of documents. Some 
> user agents also support the synonym "Previous".

A "linear sequence" implies that there is no hierarchical structure to 
the document, and it should be considered as "flattened", which matches 
the current output.  "up" doesn't fit in, though, since if the document 
structure is flattened there is no "up", but there is a <link rel="up"> 
tag output.

I think the <link> tags are not very useful in the output, but I'm 
reluctant to remove them, as there is little else to denote the 
structure of the collection of HTML files constituting the manual.

Since the meaning of the 'rel' attributes is not very well specified 
anyway, I think we should make the <link>'s match what is in the 
navigation bar.