[uf-discuss] Microformats search engine: virel

[Paul Kinlan]

Hi,

Personally, I don't get the use of microformats if the data is
obscured.  I mean, how far would you go to retain your privacy with
hCard?  There has to be a point where it becomes useless.  So, I
suppose that puts me in favour of case A.

Paul


> 2008/7/7 Angus McIntyre <angus at pobox.com>:
>>
>>
>> Ameer Dawood wrote:
>> > look what happened now. I jusst got the same kind of email. Looks like
>> they are sending emails to email addresses found in hCards. *It's just
>> like spam. I just dropped them a mail saying so.
>>
>> As a hardliner on this issue, my feeling is that any sentence that reads
>> "that's {like/almost like/a kind of/close to/etc} spam" can be reduced to
>> "that's spam" without loss of meaning or accuracy.
>>
>> The issue of spam and microformats is a dead horse that's already taken a
>> fair amount of punishment, and I think the words "out of scope" were used
>> last time the question came up. Still, I wanted to add a couple of
>> comments.
>>
>> As far as consumers of microformats are concerned, I think that any system
>> that generates automated mail to an address included in an hCard has
>> crossed the line. Outside various rather improbable scenarios, there's no
>> justification for doing this.
>>
>> As far as users of microformats are concerned, the choice is (a) include
>> your address and expect to get spam, (b) leave your address out, or (c)
>> obscure your address. I currently favor options (b) and (c). For (c), I
>> actually recommend having a human-intelligible version (e.g. 'myaddress at
>> example dot com') and then - if you like - having a run-on-document-ready
>> Javascript function to convert it to a mailto: link for human consumption.
>>
>> Crawlers - both benign and malign - typically don't execute JS, so they
>> won't see the actual email address. I don't think that's a bad thing for
>> reasons indicated above. Tools that actually run in a browser context,
>> such as Operator, should get the right result (Operator does).
>>
>> Angus
>>
>>
>>
>> --
>>
>>
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>