Nikolas 'Atrus' Coukouma wrote: >Walter Underwood wrote: > > > >>A long time ago, I proposed a robots processing instruction that could >>be used in any XML format. I can find that again. >> >> Here it is, as saved by the Wayback Machine: http://web.archive.org/web/20010407112036/http://homepages.go.com/~wunder0/robots-pi.html
I'm a tad concerned that it's not namespaced, but I can't think of a way to handle that without idiosyncracies or being invalid. It also doesn't address archiving, which isn't a large concern in a syndication format. I'm not sure if it makes sense to delay archive=yes/no until mid-processing. Generally, it seems to be the right tool for the job. It should also be discussed in detail elsewhere. Unless someone has a good reason not to, let's move. >This seems worth resurrecting. I'd rather see the element in a seperate >namespace so it >1) can be reused - most obviously, in other syndication formats, like a >flavor RSS >2) is not cluttering Atom > > > >>An in-document robots directive is useful because it is controlled >>by the document author, rather than by the webmaster. >> >>"nofollow" is not particularly useful, because there is almost always >>another path to the document. Still, it can be a polite hint to the >>robot that all the links in the doc are junk. >> >>I would use exactly the model in the HTML robots meta tag, because: >>a) that is what robots already know how to deal with, and b) it has >>proven good enough. >> >>wunder >> >> >> >> >Speaking of reuse and HTML, in some ways I'd like to just borrow the >meta tag (from the XHTML namespace), but I think it's far to generic. An >element specifically for this purpose seems better. > >-Nikolas 'Atrus' Coukouma >
