4.13.3 REL Attribute

At present REL and REV are rarely used. However, they will be of growing importance as HTML documents, and the document development environments, become more sophisticated.

The REL attribute is used to give the relationship(s) described by the hypertext link, and describes the relationship of the destination of the link to the document containing the hypertext anchor -- consequently REL cannot be used unless an HREF is present. The value for REL is a space-separated list of relationship values. For example

   <A HREF="http://foo.edu/fe.html" REL="index">sdfsddf</a>

indicates that the link is to a document that is an index related to the current document (the one you are reading).

REV is the converse of REL. Thus an anchor of the form

   <A HREF="http://foo.edu/fe.html" REV="index">sdfsddf</a>

indicates that the the document containing this anchor element is an index related to the document fe.html.

REL and REV Attribute Values

Some proposed values the relationships and their semantics are were defined in a working document by Murray Maloney of Veosystems Inc. Some information on these proposed values is found in word-processor format document, accessible from this Web site. Please see the page: http://www.utoronto.ca/webdocs/HTMLdocs/Book/Book-3ed/contents.html, and the top item on the page.