Re: Suggestion: 'rel="unrelated"'

Jens Meiert wrote:
> Nonetheless, what about 'rel="unrelated"'?

If a resource is unrealted, then why link to it in the first place? 
Unless, of course, it is a result of a user contribution; however, there 
is little chance that an automated publishing tool handling that 
contribution (without moderation) can tell the difference between 
related and unrealted (spam) comments, and thus cannot apply the 
relationship appropriately anyway.

Personally, I'm leaning towards rel="unendorsed" at the moment.  It's 
definition could be something like:

Unendorsed:
     Refers to a resource that may be related to the linking
     document, but is not endorsed by the author. This should
     not be counted as a negative rating for the resource,
     however.

User agents that choose to issue credit to a resource based on the links 
to it should issue a lowered, or no, credit rating for the link. 
However, unendorsed (even though it has a similar effect to nofollow) is 
not intended to be applied to all links recieved through user 
contribution; instead, I'm thinking that rel="contribution" and a few 
others are more appropriate for those use cases.

I am currently working on a draft proposal called "Web Communication 
Link Relationships" (WCLR) that I'm considering sending off to the GMPG 
[1] to produce an XMDP, or to the W3C if they're interested.  It should 
be finished and published in a day or two and the aim is to define 
relationships that will facilitate web communication through increased 
linking semantics.

It's currently split into 4 categories including:
   1. User Contribution
   2. Resource Tracking
   3. Communication Tracking, and
   4. Endorsement

I realise some of those category names may not make a lot of sense to 
you now, but they do when explained in the draft that I'm currently 
writing.  The relationships are based on the various ideas several 
people have published in their own blogs over the past few months and a 
few of those that I published earlier [2] (just some from the "User 
Feedback" and "Endorsemnt" categories in that post).

Rimantas Liubertas wrote:
>  Why not just rel="nopagerank"?

Because a relationship should not express user-agent-implementation 
specific functionality, but instead a semantic relationship between 
resources.

[1] http://gmpg.org/
[2] http://lachy.id.au/blogs/log/2004/08/link-relationships

-- 
Lachlan Hunt
http://lachy.id.au/
http://GetFirefox.com/    Rediscover the Web
http://SpreadFirefox.com/   Igniting the Web

Received on Friday, 21 January 2005 11:31:15 UTC