invisible-data-considered-harmful

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<entry-title>invisible data considered harmful</entry-title>

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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.)

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