Arbitrary links which are self-describing as to their intent are incredibly cool, and I’m happy Atom offers them using the link constructs plus rel attribute. (I was also a fan of RSS 1.0 mod_link, but the only one apparently) However Atom has some potentially problematic, or at least confusing limitations.

Last week, when I was thinking about Google leveraging the link construct to syndicate Usenet threading, I was rebuffed by the Atom spec which claims:

The “rel” attribute indicates the type of relationship that the link represents. Link constructs MUST have a rel attribute, whose value MUST be a string, and MUST be one of the values enumerated in the Atom API specification http://bitworking.org/projects/atom/draft-gregorio-09.html.

Now Mark is using the ‘via’ type and pointing to LinkTagMeaning as the definite list of rel types.

The Question

So my question is, LinkTagMeaning is a wiki page, does this mean that the rel vocabulary for Atom is open for growth as long as it is documented on this page? (an aside: The problem with the theory behind trackbacks – that the web is just one large conversation and therefore we don’t need to enable comments – is that I could have written this question as two sentences in the context of Mark’s blog, but its 3 paragraphs over here)