[microformats-discuss] Ambiguities in reltag specification

[Craig Ogg]

Thanks, this makes things clearer.  Comments below.

> >> How would spaces be supported in this case?   My assumption is
> >> through replacing spaces with "+", but this is not explicitly stated.
> >>
> 
> Perhaps somewhat implicit in the spec is that you would use standard
> URL encoding practices.  It is after all a URL.
> 

This makes sense.  Given the intent for end user's to be able use this
microformat (to be able to tag if there software doesn't support it)
it would probably be helpful if the spec were explicit in this case.

> >> No guidance is given as to whether or not having different link
> >> text and tag value is considered bad form.
> >>
> 
> For the most part, people make the two match.  The link text tends to
> be a readable form of the tag.  Having spoken with the spec authors,
> they indicate that not following this practice is also possible.  I'm
> not sure what the use case is though.
> 

The only one that comes to mind is to deal with special purpose tags
like event based tags.  Asking everyone to tag your event as SXSW05
but use "South by Southwest 2005" as the link text would boost the tag
repository's ranking for that search query (if my understanding of
natural search is correct).

> Have you looked at the technorati or IceRocket help pages for tags?
> 

Yes.  They say: "The [tagname] can be anything, but it should be
descriptive. Please only use tags that are relevant to the post. You
do not need to include the brackets, just the descriptive *keyword*
for your post."  (Emphasis mine).  They definitely give the impression
that only single words are supported and are silent about how to deal
with multi-word tags or whether or not they are even "allowed."

Thanks for your help.

Craig