Rel="logo" (2011)

by johns • 13 years ago

201 40 13 years ago

aaronpk2• 13 years ago

This was proposed in 2011 http://microformats.org/wiki/rejected-formats#Logo

zbowling• 13 years ago

That was for the microformat for logo. It was rejected because use rel="icon" type="image/svg+xml" already existed which is what this standard seems to push.

aaronpk2• 13 years ago

mattmc added the relogo.org site to the microformats wiki in 2011: http://microformats.org/wiki/index.php?title=existing-rel-va...

hayksaakian2• 13 years ago

What are practical applications of this?

I understand favicons and the apple touch thing -- those are used as icons on various systems.

What would this be for?

nthitz• 13 years ago

I could imagine this being useful for a service like CrunchBase or similar

modarts• 13 years ago

I'd assume it would be useful for other sites that link to sites with the logo to display it.

tass• 13 years ago

Things like:

* News site writes an article about you, grabs your logo for the article.

* Mapping applications could display your logo with your address information

Basically, it's just a way of getting an officially sanctioned website/business/whatever logo without needing to ask.

toyg• 13 years ago

I can see various applications where third-party sites could enjoy the opportunity to reliably "pull" official logos that never get old, without having to duplicate/rehost/modify them and/or incur in trademark diatribes.

For example, a stock-trading website could have official logos near (or even replacing) stock tickers. "Log in with *" buttons could be dropped altogether, mandating websites to pull the official logo. And so on.

However, like every "machine-oriented" standard that promotes embedding, I can't help but feel there are security implications, something which might not be obvious now but will end up biting our ass 5 years down the line, when spammers and gangsters start exploiting some hole in the mechanism. Embedding untrusted images is already unsafe as it is, adding support for SVG looks even more unsafe.

EDIT: and as someone else mentioned, it makes phishing easier.

Lukeas14• 13 years ago

I created a web app search engine http://iwaat.com that could make great use of this. If you need to index 1000s of sites/apps, collecting logos is still a very manual process. I imagine any other website directory, Google, news site, etc would find it useful.

hayksaakian2• 13 years ago

You guys have really great ideas. If the OP listed some as examples, it'd be easier for me to see why such a standard is necessary.

ricardobeat2• 13 years ago

What about negative versions? Grayscale? Transparent vs solid backgrounds? Logotypes usually have a different version for each of these situations.

It's too weird to have a meta tag that is only useful for websites with a white background. The narrow use case for this was solved years ago with the hcard micro format. We should be pushing microdata, not creating new niche standards.

MicahWedemeyer2• 13 years ago

I'm thinking perhaps you could have multiple instances of the tag, each for a different purpose. Most tools would use the first one, but if it's something like a browser plugin it would just display them all to you and let you choose.

breckinloggins• 13 years ago

Yup. rel="logo-foo" where "foo" is optional and some set of standard subtags.

You could even consolidate this so you had rel="logo-favicon" and the favicon just become another aspect of your logo.

All that said, I think it's a solution looking for... well, not a "problem" really, because the problem is obvious. Rather, the whole thing seems like a solution to a problem that not enough people have. I'd wager the 2011 proposal would have gotten more traction and some format adopted if this were really a pressing concern.

You know what? What I'd like to see is some kind of de facto standard rel="foo" database that, a bit like the WHATWG, kind of becomes a place where you can submit rel types, spec a schema behind it, go through some semi-formal vetting and standardization process, and be able to crawl this information in a semantically-meaningful way (in addition to just researching the different types). It'd also be nice to formalize a migration path from a <link rel="x-foo"> as a prototype declaration to a <link rel="foo"> as a 'standard'.

The closest we have to this is probably the HTML spec and WHATWG's page (http://blog.whatwg.org/the-road-to-html-5-link-relations).

alexcroox• 13 years ago

Yer that's why if you right click the logo on our website it links you to this page: http://sidigital.co/media

onlyup2• 13 years ago

Clever but it annoys me when I lose my rightclick ability.

bzalasky2• 13 years ago

Unrelated note. Love the clean, but playful aesthetic of the site.

thesorrow• 13 years ago

So nice for building phishing website :)

mattmcinerney4• 13 years ago

What do you mean by that?

eksith3• 13 years ago

By making the logo universally available via a complete URL (not relative), one may copy the format of the authentic web page to create a duplicate and the logo would still apply.

Of course, this can be circumvented by using whitelists, but then those can be compromised as well.

benschwarz• 13 years ago

It be great to query the api/a directory site to find out alternate versions or perhaps usage guidelines for the logo. Then each provider/company can have a canonical method for people to use their brand.

… its a cool idea, but somewhat floored when put into actual use.

MicahWedemeyer2• 13 years ago

If you're wondering why this would be nice, it's very useful if you want to write a blog post or something and say, "Hey, we just added support for XYZ to our tool"

Think of the sites that allow you to share on different services and they have like 100s of logos. Imagine trying to build that list. I've done stuff like that and it's a pain to try and find all the images. If there were a Chrome plugin that would tell me that a site has a sanctioned logo, it would simplify this kind of task by a ton.

pdenya• 13 years ago

I've done that myself, extremely time consuming. Still though, I don't like having this in the markup, it seems pointless since almost no one would benefit from it. It'd be better to have /logo redirect and serve the correct file. There would be no initial request for determining where it is and it adds nothing to the page loads of all the other people who don't need it.

rryan2• 13 years ago

Also, Schema.org recently added a 'logo' property to the Organization type: http://schema.org/Organization

This is useful because it's an easy way for you to declare what your logo is to spiders looking at your site. Google/Facebook/Foursquare/etc. can then use this annotation to know what logo to associate with your page instead of having to guess algorithmically.

taftster• 13 years ago

Right, and that's a bit like trusting a site's meta keywords to fully describe the search engine keywords used to rank your site.

This is an interesting thing, because how much does a search engine exactly trust your site content, especially very specific tags like this? Not very much trust, it seems to me.

rryan2• 13 years ago

On the contrary, structured microdata is used quite often by companies like Google and Facebook to understand your site better. Here are a few examples:

Rich snippets on Google allow you to customize your snippets in search:

http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&...

Using microdata and Schema.org annotations you can control the snippet that is used when your article is shared on Google+:

https://developers.google.com/+/plugins/snippet/

Google+ Local / Maps use microdata on your page to understand things like store hours, address, telephone number, categories, etc.

http://maps.google.com/help/maps/richsnippetslocal/faq.html

In fact, in the Google Webmaster Tools dashboard there is a central place where you can go to verify that the structured data Google has extracted from your site is correct (and if not, change your markup).

Facebook's Open Graph microdata format allows you to describe your site in a way that Facebook can understand. This helps when generating snippets or treating your content as media content when it gets shared on Facebook. For businesses / places they surely use this for phone numbers, address, services, etc.

http://ogp.me/ https://developers.facebook.com/docs/concepts/opengraph/

Using a logo annotation, if Facebook were to make a synthetic place page for your business or company you could imagine them looking at a logo annotation on your site to decide what logo to use. This stuff is commonplace.

grimboy• 13 years ago

Yes but the point there was that sites had motivation to misrepresent their content. What motivation could you have to misrepresent your logo?

eksith3• 13 years ago

Funny thing about standards... without adoption, they don't mean much.

And before you know it, you're littering pages with fallbacks for browsers that don't support it. I hope this one catches on though. It makes a lot more sense to have just one or two files for logos that can be reused everywhere.

steveklabnik• 13 years ago

They should really be encouraging this instead:

  rel="http://relogo.org/"

Given RFC 5988, link relations that are not yet standard should be URIs. This one is a great example of why: if you don't know what the rel means, you can de-reference it and get documentation.

olegp• 13 years ago

This would be very useful for the web app directory I'm building at https://starthq.com. At the moment I attempt to retrieve a higher resolution logo by pretending to be an iOS device via the User Agent header and pulling out the apple-touch-icon meta tag value.

mattmcinerney4• 13 years ago

I'm excited to see this come up again on Hacker News (I'm the guy proposing it). I would love for this to be an opportunity to improve my proposal. I originally put up the site over a year ago, and it has since been rejected by Microformats. I think there is room for improvement by offering variations of logos (grayscale, knockout, etc) and some way to referencing guidelines. I'd like to revisit this in hopes that it sees some larger adoption.

As a side note, for anyone interested in further thinking on this, I've discussed it on this podcast: http://onthegrid.co/post/40903339954 (discussion starts at 29:20)

justinph• 13 years ago

This is neat, but as a designer I would be very wary about more explicitly allowing anyone to use my logo without adhering to the standards of the branding system. Most brands have extensive guidelines on how logos can and cannot be used. Nothing in this proposal helps make sure that guidelines will be adhered to, and in fact makes it easier for them to be violated.

The easiest and most egregious use I could anticipate is not using proper white space, which almost every logo requires. Example: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Logo/UsageGuidelines#Clear_sp...

mattmcinerney4• 13 years ago

As a fellow designer who spends a lot of designing these guidelines, I've thought about how to include these but it does hurt the idea of making it automated.

If this proposal is to remain in it's simplest form, it would require the default logo selected to be one that is as flexible as possible and would require the design to possibly build in the space required, background color, etc.

There may also be room for additional tags that would describe the usage i.e. rel="logo grayscale" or rel="grayscale knockout"

chaz• 13 years ago

People are already abusing your logos. At least this would reduce some of the poor attempts to extract a logo off of your website's navigation.

SquareWheel• 13 years ago

I like it, but it seems like a standard that is too smart. Much like PGP it is too technical to catch on in common use.

Rel="logo" (2011)

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