Re[2]: rel="nofollow" attribute

Hello,

on 2005-01-21T13:45:55+03:00 Anne van Kesteren wrote:

>>> So world wide implementations should be ignored?
>> 
>> First of all, Google Inc., Microsoft Corp.'s MSN division, Yahoo Inc.
>>  and Six Apart Ltd. are not the whole world, despite the fact some of
>>  them are quite large corporations.

> They are globally used and cover almost the complete search market. From
> what I have read it seems that all major weblog creators joined as well.

Certainly they don't cover everything. I'm not even talking about the
market share of the local search engines. For more information on this
matter see the latest Keynote Systems report. However that may be,
even if they covered one hundred percent of the world search and blog
market, there's no reason to blindly accept their desicions.

>> Next, some of the world wide implementations should obviously be 
>> ignored. E.g., from HTML: the poorly designed blink or marquee 
>> elements. I mean, if something is available worldwide, it is 
>> advisable to use your brain to at least consider the alternatives.

> Could you give me an alternative? I do not really consider BLINK or
> MARQUEE useful by the way.

Various people on the list, and particularly Mark Birbeck, have shown
us that alternatives exist. These solutions however would require
blogging software makers and search engines to make greater efforts to
modify their software. What is worse, these solutions are likely to
require greater user efforts (e.g., users who don't clean the spam
from their blogs nowadays are not going to be keen on approving
comments or links). Like I said, short-term benefits win.

>>> If the W3C had proposed something for this a while ago, maybe in a
>>> single draft, I guess it would have been possible.
>> 
>> Clearly, there is no need for that. Authors who wish to prevent some
>>  search engines from indexing certain parts of their sites can
>> already use the syntax described at http://www.robotstxt.org/ (which
>> is truly worldwide, by the way).

> Have you even read what |rel="nofollow"| is about? I guess not.

Please do not guess. I've read the announcements.

>>> However, since it seems (I may be wrong) that the W3C is currently
>>> not really looking for what authors need, solutions are find in one
>>>  way or another and implemented in user agents.
>> 
>> Anne, do you really think that these caustic remarks are what authors
>>  actually need?

> Yes. I can see of reasons why you want to mention a site, but don't give
> it any credit or want to share any relationship with it, according to
> Google.

That was a rhetorical question. By "caustin remarks" I meant your
comments on the work of the W3C.

...

> If the W3C would have proposed something and something else was
> implemented then there is reason to critize if the proposal was any
> good.

I fail to understand what you tried to say here. The HTML WG doesn't
need to propose some special syntax for marking up spam. Spam is spam
and thus should be deleted, not marked. Marking one link as
"unapproved" is one thing. Marking *every* link in the comments as
such is another thing. It's like saying that all the users post spam,
whereas the links they provide are sometimes more useful than the blog
entry itself.

What if this list had no spam protection? Then, marking all the
incoming traffic (or at least the links) on this list as spam would be
correct?

>>> They can easily do this by looking for what authors want and what 
>>> useful extensions would be for HTML and XHTML that authors need 
>>> today instead of in 20 years.
>> 
>> Again, unhelpful critics. Look at what authors want, help the W3C, 
>> send the proposals, join the team, but please don't send "look ma, 
>> what a great piece of code is developed while you're fooling around"
>>  messages.

> I have created various proposals for CSS. I would also like to point out
> that I did not send anything about this to the W3C. I just replied to a
> message about.

I'm trying to believe you. Yet the message looked like if you were
accusing the W3C team of being lazy and myopic.

Alexander
-- 
  Alexander Savenkov                            http://www.xmlhack.ru/
  savenkov@xmlhack.ru             http://www.xmlhack.ru/authors/croll/

Received on Sunday, 23 January 2005 15:21:39 UTC