Assuming the article is talking about web links, not some new technology, why didn't it mention the rel attribute which seems essential for modelling everything

Assuming the article is talking about web links, not some new technology, why didn't it mention the rel attribute which seems essential for modelling everything talked about, as link text is too arbitrary? Also the wording seems to imply no need for semantic differentiation but calling something tag, comment or link implies a lot about the intention, so i assume the the article meant something closer to "you can implement everything mentioned with html links"? There were some projects in the linked data/ semantic web space that were very close to this. I would love to see a revisit of this idea with json instead of xml/html and ipfs instead of http.