December 10, 2002

payment LINK tags

There are already a lot of defined (if not quite standardized) possible values for the LINK element in XHTML. We're using them for RSS Auto-Discovery and, of course, for stylesheets already. But what about something like:

<link rel="appendix" type="text/html" title="payment" href="URL of Wishlist or Paypal Page" />

A standardized way of linking to the page where you pay for your patronage of a site. Granted, calling the payment page an "Apppendix" of the site you're visiting is fudging things a bit. Maybe there's a more elegant way?

9 Comments

Great idea. But wouldn't 'rel="help"' (as in, financial help) be more appropriate? :-)

rel="blackmail" (as in, "if you don't pay me $$$$, I'll stop updating my site...")

rel="ransom" seems equally appropriate too.

rel="payment" is pretty neutral, and since you're already titling the link as such, why not?
Alternatives:
rel="bribe"
rel="gimme"
rel="patronage"

rel="thenewpanhandling"

I use the bookmark link reference, as it seems like a open-ended catch-all for related links to the site you're viewing (but I didn't read the spec, it's how I've seen it used in practice).

Meta tags could possibly be used. Something like this:

<META name="payment" content="http://www.amazon.com/blah">

Or, with a scheme attribute:
<META scheme="getMeSomeMoney" name="payment" content="http://www.amazon.com/blah">

Not really graceful at all, but probably more true to what the w3 people want.

I realize this is off-topic, but since there is no way to comment on posts from the sidebar, I'll ask here: What design is it that you're accusing Popdex (i.e., Shanti) of ripping off? Looks to me like a pretty standard Blue Robot layout, mildly modified.

I didn't mirror the site when it first launched, but Popdex had originally used a great deal of Blogdex's HTML, including the same link names, same table widths, etc. It was clearly more than just "influenced", at least in its initial incarnation.

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