Andreas Haugstrup Pedersen | solitude.dk

It all began when the videobloggers started to go crazy due to RSS and content aggregation. Enclosures in RSS are great, but if the same information isn't saved directly in the HTML of the blog post it's also pretty useless. This is because quickly the item will get pushed off the feed and then you have lost your knowledge of what is enclosures and what are just normal links. Furthermore it's a problem because your feed contains way more valuable information than the blog post itself (the disadvantages should be obvious).

I proposed the use of the rel-attribute with values of alternate or enclosure back in October. I kept working along those lines because as I thought about it I realized that weblogs as a genre have more special link relations and metadata needs than just enclosures. Like permalinks, comments and ping/trackbacks.

The result is a proposal for a HTML Meta Profile For Blogs. It didn't take long to write the proposal — the time was spent on updating all my blog entries to follow this profile. As an example to show what can be done. You can see this on the monthly archive pages where I now include a list of citations and enclosures along with an excerpt of each entry. This is done by scanning each entry for instances of rel="enclosure" and rel="cite" (along with q and blockquote elements).

The advantages to using a profile like this are many. First off there is no need to change the underlying database of a blogging system because everything is stored in the HTML. That way only the blogging system UI has to be changed to enable enclosures. In the same way it can be used to optimize how trackbacks and pingbacks are handled (by only pinging rel="cite" links by default). Services like Technorati would also be able to automatically extract data from blogs in a much more precise manner. It would for example be able to know the difference between a blog front page and the permalinks.

That's where the real value is: Other services would be able to scan each blog for metadata without having to rely on guessing (this is inaccurate at best, harmful at worst). RSS is terrible for things like that, both due to the fact that it doesn't have the rich ways of describing content like HTML, and because RSS isn't archived.

I'd love to hear comments on this profile. Have I missed something? Would you implement it?