Non-visible microformats was [uf-discuss] Principles of Microformats?

[Benjamin West]

On 12/16/06, Angus McIntyre <angus at pobox.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