Non-visible microformats was Principles of Microformats?

On 12/16/06, Angus McIntyre <anguspobox.com> wrote:
> The FAQ makes it clear that the concern is that
invisible markup is
> associated with spam; because spammers like to hide
stuff in their
> pages that causes a search engine to see them
differently from human
> viewers, any proposed microformat that encourages
people to put
> normally-visible markup into a page invisibly runs the
risk of
> getting pages that carry it sanctioned by Google and
friends once the
> spammers learn how to abuse it.
>

Without commenting on the rest, I'd just like to point out
that the
main reason for avoiding invisible meta data is because
visible data
is updated more often than invisible data.  Spam is
secondary to this
principle. This is a usability phenomenon, not a spam
prevention
measure.

Ben
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In message
<8ad71be30612161220id9f32e4n2b07da19001f67f3mail.gmail.com>,
Benjamin West <bewestgmail.com> writes

>I'd just like to point out that the
>main reason for avoiding invisible meta data is because
visible data
>is updated more often than invisible data.

I've yet to see any evidence to support that oft-made
assertion.

-- 
Andy Mabbett
            *  Say "NO!" to compulsory ID Cards: 
<http://www.no2id.net/>
            *  Free Our Data:  <http://www.freeourd
ata.org.uk>
            *  Are you using Microformats, yet: <http://microformats.org/
> ?
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A key example, which is also an example of Angus' new
wiki/initiative
idea, is the more-or-less abandoned work done on Structured
Blogging.
The effort decided to attempt embedding commented out RDF
into HTML --
a practice, it was recognized, was doomed to fail because of
the
copy-paste reusability of visible data marked up in standard
HTML.

Put another way, if you rely on invisible meta data as your
mechanism
for semanticizing the visible data, because of the facility
of HTML,
as some point, that meta data will become divorced from the
original
data it was intended to describe.

Web designers and developers covet clean code; repeating and
maintaining two or more chunks of the same data simply makes
no sense,
especially when dealing with competition of the forms (ie
which is
more authoritative when determining which is a copy of the
original --
if the meta data copy and the visible copies don't match,
which do you
use?).

Finally, invisible semantics again have an increased
likelihood to
spiral out of control, since, like XML, you're free to
essentially
"make shit up" as is your won't. If you're limited
to working within
existing constraints, you're likely to have simpler formats
that are
easier and more likely to be used by web authors and
furthermore do
not take another college course to learn.

Chris

On 12/16/06, Andy Mabbett <andypigsonthewing.org.uk>
wrote:
> In message
<8ad71be30612161220id9f32e4n2b07da19001f67f3mail.gmail.com>,
> Benjamin West <bewestgmail.com> writes
>
> >I'd just like to point out that the
> >main reason for avoiding invisible meta data is
because visible data
> >is updated more often than invisible data.
>
> I've yet to see any evidence to support that oft-made
assertion.
>
> --
> Andy Mabbett
>             *  Say "NO!" to compulsory ID
Cards:  <http://www.no2id.net/>
>             *  Free Our Data:  <http://www.freeourd
ata.org.uk>
>             *  Are you using Microformats, yet: <http://microformats.org/
> ?
> _______________________________________________
> microformats-discuss mailing list
> microformats-discussmicroformats.org
> http://microformats.org/mailman/listinfo/microforma
ts-discuss
>


-- 
Chris Messina
Citizen Provocateur &
  Open Source Ambassador-at-Large
Work: http://citizenagency.com
Blog: http://factoryjoe.com/blog

Cell: 412 225-1051
Skype: factoryjoe
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Benjamin West wrote:
> Without commenting on the rest, I'd just like to point
out 
> that the main reason for avoiding invisible meta data
is 
> because visible data is updated more often than
invisible 
> data.  Spam is secondary to this principle. This is a 
> usability phenomenon, not a spam prevention measure. 

That is only true when humans are doing the updating. It is
not necessarily
true if the pages are generated from a database and the
database is what
gets updated.  

It also does not consider non-visible metadata that is
created by apps such
as CMS, Wikis, Blogs, etc.

-- 
-Mike Schinkel
http://www.mikesch
inkel.com/blogs/
http://www.welldesig
nedurls.org/



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