> From: Code for Libraries [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of
> Brett Bonfield
> Sent: Tuesday, April 14, 2009 5:35 PM
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: Re: [CODE4LIB] Anyone else watching rev=canonical?
> 
> On Tue, Apr 14, 2009 at 5:30 PM, Jonathan Rochkind <[log in to unmask]>
> wrote:
> > Wait, is this the same or different than <link rel="canonical">, as
> in:
> >
> > http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/02/specify-your-
> canonical.html
> >
> > <link rel="canonical"> seemed like a good idea to me.  But when I
> start
> > reading some of those URLs, it's not clear to me if they're talking
> about
> > the same thing or not.
> 
> Different. Which is one of the problems with rev=canonical.

Another issue is that Google, Microsoft, et al. couldn't see that their
proposal was already taken care of by HTTP with its Content-Location
header and that if they wanted people to embed the canonical URI into
their HTML that they could have easily done:

<meta http-equiv="Content-Location" content="canonical-URI" />

rather than creating a new link rel="canonical" and BTW their strategy 
only works in HTML, it doesn't work in RDF, JSON, XML, etc., but using
HTTP as it was intended, e.g., Content-Location header, it works for 
all media types.


Andy.