htmlaccessibilitysemantic-markupwcagmicroformats

Does rel="home" on an anchor tag (<a>) do anything helpful?

I see this a lot on site title links in WordPress themes (probably because Underscores does it and everyone copies that):

<a href="/" rel="home">Some Site Title</a>

I cannot find even a semi-authoritative statement anywhere that rel="home" on an anchor tag is used meaningfully today by any browser, screen reader, or other user agent. The only "official" documentation I've located is this draft specification from 2005 on the microformats.org site.

That doc proposes home as a valid value on both <link> tags in the <head>, as well as <a> tags. Using it on a <link> has some pedigree from HTML v3, and there's reference to it in the wild from 2002. But I haven't seen anything about the <a> tag usage.

So, is including it helpful for anything/anyone? Would I do better to use <link rel="home"> in the <head>, or is that obsolete too in 2020?

Solution

  • The rel="page" was part of an initiative to create permalinks (see section 'Permalink detection') as part of a standard in HTML 4.

    However with HTML 5 it now has no purpose and does not offer any accessibility or SEO value. It also might not validate using W3C validator anymore (not tested).

    rel="something" should only be used on <link> elements, with the exception of rel="noopener", rel="nofollow" or rel="noreferrer" on anchors (<a> tags).

    Note - There may be other rel="" for hyperlinks but the two stated are the only ones I can think of, it is no longer valid to use it for page locations, bookmarks etc.

    Update

    Thanks to @Sean who pointed out in the comments other elements can accept rel="", however MicroFormats are not the preferred way of adding structured data according to Google and their development is not as full fledged as using https://schema.org and JSON+LD.

    “We currently prefer JSON-LD markup. I think most of the new structured data come out for JSON-LD first. So that’s what we prefer.” - John Mueller

    I am obviously incorrect in what I said as it is perfectly valid, however personally I would not bother and stick with what Google prefers apart from the few items I listed.

    See @Sean's answer for a bit more info on the subject.

    for clarity rel="" has no bearing on accessibility