[microformats-discuss] Comments on robot exclusion

[Peter Janes]

Robert Bachmann wrote:
> http://microformats.org/wiki/robots-exclusion is quite interesting.
> 
> I wonder if an simple application (perhaps a PHP or Python script)
> for visualization makes sense.

I think that might be overkill, considering the example page at
http://peterjanes.ca/2005/robots/example does something very similar already
using only CSS styles and a little bit of JavaScript to toggle them.  I'll
admit that the toggle that actually displays the alternate view wasn't all
that visible on the page; it should be better now.  (It's beyond my ken to
figure out how to get that page on the wiki.)

> For example this application could be invoked with an URL of a HTML
> document. The application phrases the HTML document and displays:
> - links which would be followed in green.
> - links which wouldn't be followed in red.

That's somewhat clearer than the styles I originally chose; I've updated the
example page accordingly.

> Do you think such an application would make sense?
> If yes, I could try to implement it.

A JavaScript bookmarklet is probably all it would take to apply on demand to a
page, or a GreaseMonkey user script to browse in "robot mode".

Thanks for the comments.

Peter J.
-- 
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