Last modified: 2012-12-30 21:00:03 UTC
Since some wikis (e.g. English Wikinews, to name one off the top of my head) use categories more like traditional tags than containing categories (and rel="tag" is usable for other wikis' category structures), and microformats are Good Things, it might be a good idea to add an option/extension (probably not a default setting, though) to add 'rel="tag"' to the links to categories that appear at the bottom of a page.
In general, this would have issues with spaces being encoded as _ instead of %20 or + as required, and that it would all fall down if short urls weren't in use (but if we're just looking at Wikinews specificly, that might not be that big a deal). "Tags" are quite widely used in the blog world, and I believe there are many real world use cases of people using such information, so it probably would be cool. I personally think that most (all) wikis category structures are essentially close enough to "tag"'s that this could apply everywhere, but I suppose that's debatable. Relevant info: http://microformats.org/wiki/rel-tag HTML5 spec also mentions it very briefly: "The tag keyword indicates that the tag that the referenced document represents applies to the current document."
The encoding of spaces should not be an issue. To a well-written parser, the tags "Turkey Vulture" "Turkey_Vulture" and "Turkey%20Vulture" should be synonymous.
(In reply to comment #2) > The encoding of spaces should not be an issue. To a well-written parser, the > tags "Turkey Vulture" "Turkey_Vulture" and "Turkey%20Vulture" should be > synonymous. Standard seems to imply that Turkey_Vulture and Turkey%20Vulture are two different tags (with potentially) different meanings. Well it might make sense to assume underscore and space are synonyms, I don't feel we should assume that unless the standard says so.
If by "spec" you mean http://microformats.org/wiki/rel-tag it says "Spaces can be encoded either as + or %20." (so "Turkey+Vulture" is also a synonym) but is silent on underscores. Note, though, that it's a draft, and is intended to reflect real-world usage. Someone who can be bothered to deal with the "not invented here" attitude of the microformat community might like to raise this as a proposed change to the draft. None the less, it's still worth adding the proposed change to MediaWiki. "Turkey_Vulture" (the format we emit) is a useful and valid tag in its own right.
P.S. Note also the use of underscores in several of the examples on: http://microformats.org/wiki/rel-tag-spaces including Wikipedia.
(In reply to comment #5) > P.S. > > Note also the use of underscores in several of the examples on: > > http://microformats.org/wiki/rel-tag-spaces > > including Wikipedia. Well in that case I withdraw my previous objection on those grounds.
