anti-patterns

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Revision as of 11:04, 16 December 2007 by AndyMabbett (talk | contribs) (social-network-anti-patterns)
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anti-patterns

This is an index page for pointing to various known anti-patterns, in particular those that have been encountered by the microformats community during the development of POSH patterns or microformats within

New anti-patterns may be documented here at first and then moved to their own page(s).

known anti-patterns

recent anti-patterns

These anti-patterns have been recently noted:

removing data from its context

HTML4 contains numerous mechanisms for storing machine data in a document in the <head> such as a list of <link> or <meta> elements.

This is an anti-pattern.

Disconnecting data (or meta-data, whatever you prefer to call it) from its context inevitably leads to corruption, and loss of fidelity. Meta keywords rotted for example. One person writes the template with the head and link and meta, and another puts the content in the page, etc.

Removing data from its context is an anti-pattern.

empty hyperlinks

More than once it has been proposed to use empty hyperlinks to store machine readable information at least near the context of the related human readable information.

Empty hyperlinks are still problematic for several reasons however:

any SEO worth his salt will know anchor text links that go nowhere, will

  • A, reduce the quality of out going links from your site so reducing PR (Page Rank) and
  • B, more than likely get you banned from google because it will think you are trying to spam it...

See also