Bloglines are
proposing
an RSS/Atom extension element for feed access control,
essentially:
<access:restriction relationship="deny" />
The intention is for this to be used when the publisher doesn't
want any indexing or republishing of their feed.
Alex
Barnett is critical, and though I agree with his point that the
syndication/search tools should be working on better indexing, I'm
not sure that means this proposal is a bad idea.
My first impression was that this was probably a good idea, but
after a couple of minutes thought I'm having my doubts. A good
touchstone for proposals like this is the question "would it work
for HTML?". Well yes I think it would, at least to the extent that
robots.txt
currently works, in fact there's already the HTML
<head> advice, e.g.
<meta name="robots" content="noindex,nofollow" />
Architecturally it's probably a bit neater than robots.txt
(because it doesn't hijack URI space). I think there is a social
problem though, highlighted by the words of this post from
Marshall
Kirkpatrick:
âEverything you blog goes on your permanent
record!â How many times have we heard that
lately? From employment to family situations, many people have
been frustrated to find out that things they intended to write
for a personal audience is now discoverable by anyone in the
world via search engines. Bloglines proposed a new standard
tonight to change that.
Nope. The Bloglines proposal does absolutely nothing for
authorization. The element is purely advisory, optional. Maybe
Google won't index the stuff directly (assuming they support the
proposal), but if someone else republishes with a tool that doesn't
recognise the extension then that might well get indexed. Post hoc
it may help legal action against people that have republished on
copyright grounds, but even there it doesn't really add much.
So although so far I can't see any problem with this proposal on
technical grounds, the fact that its capability is likely to be
misunderstood probably outweighs its potential benefit. Probably
best just to use
HTTP
Digest or robots.txt (depending on what you want).
@en