[Sigia-l] <link> type for permalinks?

[Eric Scheid]

I'm researching the use of <link> tags, particularly for auto-discovery 
scenarios (like Mark Pilgrim's RSS auto-discovery) and for other 
metadata/interoperability scenarios.

A question: is there a <link> implementation used to define the canonical 
URI for a given document, ie. it's preferred permalink? I ask because 
it's not unusual to be able to access the same resource via multiple 
URLs: 

For example, all these urls load the same page
  http://IAwiki.net/CMS
  http://IAwiki.net/ContentManagementSystem
  http://www.IAwiki.net/ContentManagementSystem
  http://www.IAwiki.net/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?ContentManagementSystem
  http://203.30.247.17/ContentManagementSystem

The preferred URL is the second one.

The w3c outlines several well accepted link relationships 
[http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/types.html#type-links] such as 
alternate, stylesheet, chapter, and help; all which point to *other* 
documents, but none which point to itself. They do say that authors may 
wish to define additional link types not described in this 
specification... which prompts my question: 

     is there a link type for permalinks?

e.

______________________________________________________________________
eric at ironclad.net.au                 i r o n c l a d   n e t w o r k s
information architect                      http://www.ironclad.net.au/