Category Archives: MarkUp

SGML, (X)HTML, XML and other markup languages.

NoNoFollow

Google, MarkUp

I came across this interesting wiki today, called NoNoFollow – Fight Spam, Not Blogs, via a comment in Technorati Sees Blogspam Rising by Steve Rubel – An interesting article claming that spam is on the rise through blogs themselves, not just their comments. This just proves that nofollow did not meet it’s objective to prevent comment spam, it may have just increased it in other ways!

The 12 arguments currently presented in the NoNoFollow wiki aren’t quite as persuasive as mine, but the site does show some promise. Since it’s a wiki, anyone can edit it and I will do my part to improve it later. Despite the low quality of the current arguments, I fully support their campaign to stop the spread of nofollow, as I have been saying since it was unleashed by google in January.

IE File Upload Validation

MarkUp, Microsoft, Standards, User Agents

At last, Microsoft have finally fixed an extraordinarily annoying broken feature of IE introduced with Windows XP Service Pack 2. The problem, for which I previously published a temporary solution and which has been experienced and documented by many since at least September last year, has been resolved. The W3C’s Bug 838 tracked and discussed this issue up until its resolution that has come with Microsoft’s Security Bulletin MS05-014. The patch is available through Windows Update.

The W3C QA team have published a document explaining the issue and solutions, which has been linked from the MarkUp Validator. Hopefully, this now means the continuing flow of error reports to www-validator will cease, or at least slow down. Of course my recommended solution has been, and always will be, to use an alternate browser that does not suffer from such fatal bugs. This is especially the case for user’s of the validator since most will be web developers that really need to develop within standards compliant environments; however, the persistent use of IE among many developers is one thing I fail to understand.

Search Engine Optimisation

Accessibility, Google, MarkUp, User Agents

Roger Johansson has recently posted a fantastic article on the basics of search engine optimisation. His main points include writing good content, useful page titles, structured headings, friendly URLs, getting people to link to you and the importance of valid, semantic, lean and accessible markup. After reading it, the points do really seem like common sense, but it’s amazing how many sites just get it wrong. It’s definately well worth a read, if you haven’t already.