What is the correct syntax here? Where is this documented in the HTML 4.01 spec?
Ah, found it:
http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/struct/links.html#h-12.3
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/strict.dtd">
<HTML>
<HEAD>
<TITLE>Chapter 2</TITLE>
<LINK rel="Index" href="../index.html">
<LINK rel="Next" href="Chapter3.html">
<LINK rel="Prev" href="Chapter1.html">
</HEAD>
...the rest of the document...
but wait -- only the oddball <link> tag? Does this syntax work for hyperlinks?
<a href="http://example.com" rel="next">
That's easiest, anything else and this is not worth doing.
edit: the op specifically said
all the next/prev links at the bottom of SO pages had rel=next / rel=prev on them
We already do rel="tag" on links that are tags, so I am going to do the same for the pagination next and previous links.