robots-exclusion-brainstorming

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robots exclusion brainstorming

This page contains brainstorming, thoughts, and proposals for extending the robots-exclusion microformat.

specific user agents

robots-exclusion lacks the ability to allow control of specific UAs à la A Standard for Robot Exclusion. While this is out of scope currently since meta robots has no specific control of UAs either, here are some thoughts that have been proposed:

If it is actually necessary to control specific UAs here is an possible soluiton. Example:

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
<html>
<head>
<link rel="schema.RobotExclusion" href="http://example.org/.../" />
<meta name="RobotExclusion.RobotName1" content="Foo Bot" />
<meta name="RobotExclusion.RobotName2" content="Bar Bot" />
<meta name="RobotExclusion.RobotName3" content="Evil Bot" />
</head>
<body>
<h1>Page</h1>
<p class="robots-noindex">This paragraph shouldn't be indexed by any bot.</p>
<p class="robot3-noindex">This paragraph should be indexed by every bot except "Evil Bot".</p>
<p class="robots-noindex robot1-index">This paragraph should only be indexed by "Foo Bot".</p>
</div>
</body>
</html>

Of course it is a waste of bandwith if there are "RobotExclusion.RobotName" meta tags on every page of a website. Thus this metatags should be stored on one page - perhaps the main page - so they can be maintained easily.

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
<html>
<head>
<link rel="schema.RobotExclusion" href="http://example.org/.../" />
<link rel="RobotExclusion.Names" href="http://mypage.com/" />
</head>
<body>
<h1>Page</h1>
<p class="robots-noindex">This paragraph shouldn't be indexed by any bot.</p>
<p class="robot3-noindex">This paragraph should be indexed by every bot except "Evil Bot".</p>
<p class="robots-noindex robot1-index">This paragraph should only be indexed by "Foo Bot".</p>
</div>
</body>
</html>

problems

  • use of the meta element violates the visibility principle of microformats.
  • encoding content such as "robot1" or "robot3" into class values violates the principle of not putting content into the class attribute.

poll

  • -1 Tantek due to the above problems, and the fact that we have yet to see much adoption of robots-exclusion in the first place, I think the proposal is both premature and flawed.

Habakuk extensions

  • As I read this, I had the idea to use this microformat to differentiate the real content of a webpage from the rest (navigation, header, footer, ...) - you could do this by marking the "real content" with the tag "index", but thats not really clear. Maybe you could create a new tag to mark the really important things on the page (the "real content") from the rest. --Habakuk 03:42, 14 Jan 2007 (PST)
  • And another idea is to mark an area of a page as independent from the rest (p.e. for listings of softwaretools - if i search for an software that can do a and b i don't want to get a result that offers me a software that can do a and another that can do b). --Habakuk 03:42, 14 Jan 2007 (PST)

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