On Fri, Jan 9, 2009 at 5:13 PM, Ben Adida <[email protected]> wrote: > Tab Atkins Jr. wrote: >> This brings up different issues, however. > > Is inherent resistance to spam a condition (even a consideration) for > HTML5? If so, where is the concern around <title>, which is clearly > featured in search engine results?
Well, it's something that we probably want to keep in mind, because it's so relevant for the success of any such proposal. I wouldn't want to lend support to a feature that turned out to be immediately useless due to spam. Lot of wasted effort on the WG's, Ian's, and possibly browser developer's part. To answer your specific question, <title> is under the control of the site author, and search engines already have elaborate methods to tell a spammy site from a hammy one, thus downranking them. On the other hand, the hypothetical attack scenario I outlined was about metadata that could be added to the page by external parties. If we were today discussing adding <title> to HTML5 to help search engines provide a short summary of a page, and part of the proposal might allow blog commenters to change the title of pages on a whim, I'd certainly be equally concerned. ^_^ ~TJ
