[Pmwiki-users] Preventing "comment spam"

Patrick R. Michaud pmichaud
Wed Jan 19 20:24:36 CST 2005


On Thu, Jan 20, 2005 at 01:52:55PM +1300, Robin wrote:
> On Thursday 20 January 2005 06:32, Patrick R. Michaud wrote:
> > 1. rel="nofollow" for all external links (new default for beta20)
> > 2. rel="nofollow" for unapproved external links only
> > 3. no rel="nofollow" at all (default for beta19 and earlier)
> > 4. not linking unapproved external links at all
> Caution: by doing this you are breaking HTML validity. rel="" is a valid 
> attribute for 'a', but "nofollow" isn't a standard value for it.
> http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/types.html#type-links
> For it to be properly valid, we'll need to include an appropriate profile 
> link.

Actually, the specification says that authors "may wish to define
additional link types" and that they "should use a profile
to cite the conventions used to define the link types."  The lack of
a profile link doesn't make the HTML invalid -- if it did, then the
specification would have said "must use" instead of "should use".

So, rel="nofollow" without an appropriate profile may not follow
W3C guidelines, but it's still valid HTML.

> Also, looking through this w3.org page, I suggest that we put rel="next", 
> rel="prev", rel="index" as appropriate on wiki-trials, and rel="contents" on 
> the link that takes you back to the group homepage. This means that browsers 
> that handle it can give a standard control for it all to the user.

We did this a couple of years ago and discovered that there weren't
sufficient numbers of browsers around that supported it to make it
worth the effort (it's not entirely a trivial change).  Of course, that 
may have changed by now.  I'll have to search the archives 
(summer 2003) to see what we did then and what our results were.  
In the meantime, add the above as a PITS entry.  :-)

Pm



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