Define the the term “the external resource is to be applied”

[sideshowbarker]

https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/semantics.html#the-link-element says:

The exact behavior for links to external resources depends on the exact relationship, as defined for the relevant link type. Some of the attributes control whether or not the external resource is to be applied (as defined below).

…but the term “the external resource is to be applied” is not clearly defined—not with a dfn anywhere, but also not otherwise defined in prose that makes it immediately obvious what it means.

I can create a PR for this but it’s probably best to wait until we wrap up #2354 and merge it.

[sideshowbarker]

So I dug back into the history of that statement in the spec but found that it’s been that way unchanged since it was first added 12 years ago https://web.archive.org/web/20050301091946/http://whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/

It’s not a necessary statement and upon consideration doesn’t seem to be serving any useful purpose; it adds nothing as far as clarification on the rest of the content in that section—in fact, it distracts from the rest of the content in that it leads a (careful) reader to expect something substantive about external resources being “applied” to be clearly defined in the spec text that follows. But the spec text that follows doesn’t provide that, so it seems better to just drop that sentence altogether, which is what #2513 does.