The LINK Element
Whereas the tag is used to create hyperlinks that a user can follow when he or she wants to, the LINK element is used to connect various resources to an HTML document. Style sheets, color palettes, international versions of the document, scripts, indexes, notices--all can be tied to an HTML document using the tag. One simple way to look at it is to think of the tag as a link for readers of an HTML document, whereas the LINK tag is a resource for creators of that document. One basic application for the tag is to link a document to a style sheet, like this:This line would link the document to the style sheet "OurStyle.css" for display on a monitor screen.
The tag can also be used to define a document's relationship to another document. Note that the element doesn't display anything in the browser window--it's simply there as a reference tool for you and for search engines and Webcrawler robots.
The REV attribute indicates the reverse relationship from the REL attribute. That is, it shows that a page is "superior" to the referenced document. REV and REL attributes can take just about any value, though there is some ongoing effort to create some standardized values to make relationships between documents clearer. Here are some of the proposed values for
REV and REL:
Value Indicates
Parent Parent document
Index Index document
Previous Previous page
Next Next page
Contents Contents page
Alternate Alternate version
Begin Beginning page
A value of Alternate indicates that the referenced document is an alternate version of the current page. This can be for a version for print, for example, or even a page in an alternate language. In this case, you'd add an additional attribute, LANG, to show the language of the linked version. For example, the following would indicate an alternate page in French:
The initial example a few paragraphs back used the value MEDIA=screen to indicate that the stylesheet being linked to was for display on a video screen. It could have just as easily said MEDIA=print to indicate a print version.
