- From: T.V Raman <raman@google.com>
- Date: Thu, 29 Mar 2007 09:06:52 -0700
- To: public-html@w3.org
I typed this up as part of a private response to someone on this list, but thought this piece was useful for a broader audience. When using terms like "visible" it's important to remember "visible to whom?". As an example, consider the "nofollow" attribute on the <a> element. Earlier messages in this thread asserted that "visible metadata" was better than "invisible metadata" and used the link vs a analogy to arrive at a somewhat spurious conclusion that all "invisible" metadata was unreliable or somehow less desirable than "visible" metadata. I believe the bug there is the failure to ask "visible to whom?" -- the following is important: A) The metadata needs to be "visible" to the intended target. B0- The metadata needs to be "invisible" to those it's not intended for. Thus, the nofollow attribute on element <a> is visible to search engines --- its intended audience -- and by remaining invisible to the human user gets immediate traction; it has no negative effect on presentation. Similarly, multiple link elements in the head element are better than turning each into a "human visible" anchor --- this allows the browser to fetch the version best suited to the user e.g. language variant, without having to show a large number of "human visible" links at the top of the page that take you to all the available language versions. -- Best Regards, --raman Title: Research Scientist Email: raman@google.com WWW: http://emacspeak.sf.net/raman/ Google: tv+raman GTalk: raman@google.com, tv.raman.tv@gmail.com PGP: http://emacspeak.sf.net/raman/raman-almaden.asc
Received on Thursday, 29 March 2007 16:07:09 UTC