In 2012 the FSF published human- and machine-readable recommendations for labeling the license and source information for JavaScript (JS) programs on the Web. In addition to recommending the use of license and source tags for comment fields, we also encourage sites to maintain a single page of JavaScript License Web Labels, which contains a table with three columns with links to the (minified) JS file used on a given page, the license of that JS program, and the source code of that program. On each page that uses JavaScript, we encourage people to include a link to the labels page, and within the HTML link, to make use of a machine-readable attribute/value combination of rel="jslicense". For example, the footer of fsf.org has the following HTML:

<a href="https://weblabels.fsf.org/www.fsf.org/CURRENT/" rel="jslicense">JavaScript Licenses</a></pre>

The rel="jslicense" attribute allows tools, such as GNU LibreJS, to know where to find the labels page to determine if each JS file being served is free software, and if it is, then to allow your browser to download and run that program.

Unfortunately, when we first published our web labels recommendation, one problem web developers encountered was the fact that rel="jslicense" attribute was not considered "valid" HTML5, and so tools such as W3C's Markup Validation Service would return an error stating that the rel="jslicense" tag was invalid attribute. However, earlier this month, we were able to get rel="jslicense" to become a rel value that is considered valid HTML5.

To get rel="jslicense" recognized as a valid HTML5 link type, we needed to get it listed on the existing-rel-values page of the Microformats.org wiki. Specifically, the W3C's HTML5 specification states that link types defined as extensions in the Microformats.org wiki page with the status "proposed" or "ratified" may be used with the rel attribute on <link>, <a>, and <area> tags. So, in 2014, we submitted our "jslicense" rel-value for review on Microformats.org, and then after some conversations with Microformats.org administrators and showing that various sites were actually making use of "jslicense" rel-value, the good folks at Microformats.org listed "jslicense" as a valid (i.e. "proposed") HTML5 link type extension.

Special thanks to Tantek Çelik of Microformats.org for taking the time to give us feedback on our proposal and for ultimately adding it as a proposed value.