invisible-data-considered-harmful

invisible data considered harmful

This article is a stub.

Invisible data or metadata for that matter is undesirable.

See Principles of visibility and human friendliness.

Also known as, "dark data", "meta tags", "side files".

invisible metadata failures

• meta keywords
  • popular in the 1990s, eventually spammed, and rotten, ignored by Google, Yahoo, and other search engines.

• meta ICBM
  • people move, don't bother to update their meta ICBM
  • people get it wrong (because it's not obviously visible)
    • swapping lat and long
    • "correcting" negative values to positive (or vice versa)
    • note clusters of sites in the middle of oceans or other open spaces that correlate with inverse (or negated) coordinates of actual cities

• lang="en"
  • lots of templates, CMS's shipped with this default
  • people used them worldwide
  • now lang="en" is effectively meaningless/untrustworthy since tons of non-en sites all have it (from abovementioned templates etc.)

related

• namespaces-considered-harmful
• namespaced-attributes-considered-harmful
• principles
• The "DRY" principle