Sunday, February 17, 2008
[LTMP] Link Title Metadata Proposal
Link title metadata has become common place on news aggregrator/ranking sites like reddit, digg, delicious, and many others. A search today for "NSFW" on google returned 7,350,000 hits.
For those new to link metadata, NSFW is an acronym for "Not Safe For Work". This is Metadata in the title of a link to provide additional information about the linked resource for the benefit of readers. A tag of "NSFW" means that the end-user should NOT click on the link if they are at work or they could get in trouble. Adding such descriptive metadata to the title of a link is a great service to end-users. I applaud whoever started this trend. However, I have recently seen ambiguous and inconsistent variations on the use of link title metadata which means it may be time for a standard. For example, I recently saw [PIC] as a keyword; of course, PIC is not an acronym and right down lower on the same page was [Image] which is a much better description. Why do we need a standard? Browsers and sites (like reddit) may want to rely on this metadata for their customers - for example, a site may want to place all NSFW content in a separate section of their site. To do this, programs needs to be able to rely on the metadata ... fortunately, by following a few simple rules we can accomplish this.
LTMP Proposed Standard:
For those new to link metadata, NSFW is an acronym for "Not Safe For Work". This is Metadata in the title of a link to provide additional information about the linked resource for the benefit of readers. A tag of "NSFW" means that the end-user should NOT click on the link if they are at work or they could get in trouble. Adding such descriptive metadata to the title of a link is a great service to end-users. I applaud whoever started this trend. However, I have recently seen ambiguous and inconsistent variations on the use of link title metadata which means it may be time for a standard. For example, I recently saw [PIC] as a keyword; of course, PIC is not an acronym and right down lower on the same page was [Image] which is a much better description. Why do we need a standard? Browsers and sites (like reddit) may want to rely on this metadata for their customers - for example, a site may want to place all NSFW content in a separate section of their site. To do this, programs needs to be able to rely on the metadata ... fortunately, by following a few simple rules we can accomplish this.
LTMP Proposed Standard:
- Enclose Link Title Metadata keywords in brackets; for example, [NSFW] or [SFW].
- Link Title Metadata should either be at the beginning or end of a link title.
- Reserve all capitals in a keyword for acronyms. Use a capitalized keyword for non-acronyms; for example, [Image] or [Video] or [Song].
- The community should develop a list of well-known LTM keywords. I have also seen [Tutorial], [
], [Graph], [Cartoon], [Non-Linkjacked], etc. Here is an initial list with definitions. - Link Title Metadata can have multiple words in a keyword; however, multiple keywords should be separated by a ',' (comma). For example, [NSFW, Image].
- Plural keywords should be used when appropriate; for example, [Image] versus [Images].
- [optional] If you have an authoritative source for the keyword, that can optionally be added with a "source" keyword followed by a ':' (colon) followed by the metadata keyword. An example of this would be "[W3C:Standard]OWL 2.0 is out!".
Labels: proposal metadata standard
