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The IANA registry contains a official link relation type of "related"

related: Identifies a related resource.

https://www.iana.org/assignments/link-relations/link-relations.xhtml

I have also read the referenced RFC4287.

The value "related" signifies that the IRI in the value of the href attribute identifies a resource related to the resource described by the containing element. For example, the feed for a site that discusses the performance of the search engine at "http://search.example.com" might contain, as a child of atom:feed:

<link rel="related" href="http://search.example.com/"/>

An identical link might appear as a child of any atom:entry whose content contains a discussion of that same search engine.

But that only seemed more confusing to me. Aren't all links related? After all rel = relation.

Can anyone try to clarify this and give valid use cases for rel="related"? Is it just a catch all relation type?

Community
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Martin Hansen
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1 Answers1

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It’s a generic “this link is related to this entry” link relation.

The related link relation serves three use cases:

  1. Link an entry to a related entry from the same publisher. Some content management systems can keyword-match entry archives and find related/suggested/recommended entries.
  2. Link to a related external document. E.g. an entry discussing Facebook’s privacy policy could link to it and a Facebook blog post announcing a policy change. (You can include multiple links with the same relation.) This use cases is intended to enable link-clustering use cases. E.g. grouping entries discussing the same thing/link from different feeds, or rank a  “hot topic” at the top of the feed list (like the Fever feed reader did).
  3. Blogs doing reading-list/daily-digests/link-curations/etc. can link to all the external documents they recommend.

The two last use cases are expressions of the Semantic Web. This was one of the ways we were supposed to get personalized set of trending topics/links/things from our feed subscription. Twitter and Google Now is the global arbitrators of this today.

However, this link relation can also be used by feed readers to display a list of related links from the publisher. The link:title attribute can set the link title to present them to people.

Daniel
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