[UPDATE: image below is clickable, with rollovers that display a small amount of relevant content, exported by Compendium]

There's been some interesting discussion back and forth about a recent proposal in the Technorati Developer Wiki to have 'vote links'. The basic idea, as stated on the site itself (linked in the diagram below) is as follows:

I propose that we add a set of three new values for the rel attribute of the link tag in HTML. The new values are "vote-for" "vote-abstain" or "vote-against", which are mutually exclusive, and represent agreement, abstention or indifference, and disagreement respectively. A link without an explicit vote 'rel' value is deemed to have value "vote-for" or "vote-abstain", depending on the application. Additional human-readable commentary can be added using the existing 'title' attribute, which most browsers show as a rollover.

It's an interesting idea, but I think the cut-and-thrust of the debate around it (highlighted in the diagram in fact) really rests on the fact that links (today) have zero semantics associated with them, and in the long run this is going to be problematic. While it's true that users don't want to go through the 'pain barrier' associated with annotating links, wouldn't it be nice if a crawler could deliver them to us automatically, and then provide some lightweight annotation that we could annotate 'to taste'... in fact the diagram below does exactly this, and at the same time shows you the original proposal and a few 'pro' and 'con' arguments in a manner that I believe is much more evocative than any 'inline text with links' I might have provided here.


How on earth did I get such a diagram? Well, following the 'duelling blogs' discussion that Stowe and I started a few months ago, I did some experiments reported here, and what you see is a first-pass entirely manual variant (manually dragging and dropping pages into Compendium that is, which then exports a slicker/Javascripted variant of the above diagram!), just to put up as a little thought-experiment and discussion point!