How to express the content referenced by the anchor tag

Question

I'd like to express in an HTML document what kind of document is pointed by an anchor tag (<a>). For example, is it a list of dates, or a list of people, etc... All referenced documents will be Atom feeds, but the links will be displayed differently based on what the feed contains.

I see 2 options :

1. using the "rel" attribute : this attribute is supposed to contains the relation between the current document and the referenced document. I don't think this is an optimal solution as this attribute is supposed to define the relation and not really the content. The referenced document will be a list of dates for all documents referencing it.

2. using the "type" attribute : this attribute is supposed to contains the content type of the referenced document. This solution seems closer to what I try to achieve, but this attribute should contains a content type and not a more generic description of the link.

Which solution would you recommend ? Do you see a cleaner way to achieve the same result ?

Answer 1

Use the class attribute, since your intent is make them appear different this would seem to be the best choice.

Answer 2

Perhaps something like microformats will help?

Answer 3

title attribute on a link allows you to give the link a title which is displayed when it's hovered.

That might be what you want.