[uf-discuss] How to avoid building erroneous social network graphs?

[Dan Brickley]

On 27 Mar 2008, at 07:34, Ciaran McNulty wrote:

> On Wed, Mar 26, 2008 at 7:32 PM, Costello, Roger L.
> <costello at mitre.org> wrote:
>> <p>Hi Alice.  Nice page.  I would like to introduce you to my  
>> friend <a
>> href="Sally.html" rel="friend">Sally</a> some time.</p>
>
> If a page has @rel="me" links then it shouldn't really be allowing
> comments that can attempt to build social graphs.
>
> The simplest way to stop it is to add @rel="nofollow" to any comment
> links - this has the effect of negating any XFN values in the links,
> as well as preventing linkspamming and all sort of other good stuff.

Where is this interaction specified? Should a compliant XFN parser not  
emit any data from elements where it finds rel=nofollow? Does that  
extend to all Microformats.org ('big M') microformats?

> As others have said, this is a publishing issue rather than a parsing
> issue.  A page that is linked to with @rel="me", and then allows
> outbound XFN values authored by people who are not the representative,
> is broken.

Presumably they could *author* the links, but they just have to bear  
in mind that (if the claims in the page are ever to be true) those  
links describe the person who is the 'primary topic' (or 'owner') of  
the page.

cheers,

Dan

-- 
http://danbri.org/