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The use of the term "alternate" confused me, but I'm a little less confused after reading AnneVanKesteren's suggestion at http://intertwingly.net/wiki/pie/LinkTagMeaning: "It has been suggested to replace 'alternate', currently being specified as the permalink for the ENTRY, with 'bookmark', which seems semantically more appropriate." The idea of a single link element with a link type of "alternate" looks pretty strange to me. The term "alternate" usually identifies a secondary version of something, so if there is no primary version, I have to wonder: alternate to what?
The description of "alternate" at http://bitworking.org/projects/atom/draft-gregorio-09.html#rfc.section.5.4.1 makes sense: "The URI in the href attribute points to an alternate representation of the containing resource." I don't understand how we get from there to saying that "alternate" means "permalink", as the article does.
I see now that the various rel values are taken from the HTML link types (http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/types.html#h-6.12), but this defines "Alternate" as "Designates substitute versions for the document in which the link occurs"--a perfectly sensible definition, although completely at odds with the Atom use of the term as described in this article. If the Atom spec must choose from among the values listed for the HTML a/@rel element, then Anne's suggestion makes even more sense.
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