Firas Durri

<Vidar> we should do rel=”idiot”
<Vidar> that would be great
<Vidar> and then we can see how does the hate network turn out to be
<Vidar> we could call it XUYN
<Vidar> the XHTML Up Yours Network

While we’re at it, despite my initial enthusiasm for rel=nofollow, it’s obvious that people’s reticence to universally adopt the initiative is going to kill it. Whatever. Meanwhile, I’d just like to point out to the people who came up with this ‘nofollow’ business:

Hey guys! “nofollow” is not a relationship! It’s a verb for the search spider, not a description of the linked document! No, don’t tell me about robots meta tag—read the spec!

I will gouge my eyes out with a spoon if rel=nofollow passes through any respectable standards body as-is. Screw you Google, don’t mess with the English language or HTML while you’re dreaming up ad-hoc standards.

I know what you’re going to say. ‘Nofollow’ can be descriptive phrase. Sorry, screw you all the same. Read the blasted spec:

The rel attribute specifies the relationship of the linked document with the current document.

It’s a relationship to the current document.. What on earth does whether a spider crawls something or not–you know, follows a link or not–have to do with the document containing the link? How about, oh, ‘untrusted’ or ‘vote-abstain’ or some other sane phrase?

The nofollow link type must be renamed. No excuses.

Update #1: Check out On being relative: rel=”nofollow” and semantic drift for a summary of what rel has meant so far. I disagree with his statement that search engine instructions are harmless given a semantic profile. Search engines can go to hell; they have nothing to do with the semantics of my webpages. Give the value a name that provides meaning to my document—search engines can interpret it however they want.

Also, if someone says that ‘nofollow’ has meaning because the authority of the linking document doesn’t ‘follow’ on to the linked document, they get an obfuscation award.

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