Andrew L. Van Slaars

I link to a lot of sites from this blog and most of the time it is because I agree with something on the other end of the link. I am usually praising a product or idea or just pointing to an accurate reference.

The ability to link to other information is great, that’s what the web is all about. If I could make it more obvious that these were positive endorsements, I think it would add value to my posts. In the event that I disagree with something, linking to it and making my intentions apparent there would be a benefit to those reading my blog.

Enter VoteLinks. The VoteLinks microformat allows you to markup your links with one of three voting values:

1. vote-for
2. vote-abstain
3. vote-against

These values are specified in the anchor tag as a value for the rev attribute. So a link to Wordpress, with a positive vote (of course) would look like this:

<a rev="vote-for" href="http://wordpress.org/"
   title="Wordpress - Blog Tool and Weblog Platform">Wordpress</a>

Once all of this code is in place, a little bit of CSS and/or JavaScript allows you to use these values to alter the appearance and/or behavior of these links. As VoteLinks are more widely adopted, search engines could use votes to calculate link relevance and with enough information compiled, tracking positive vs. negative traffic in site analytics could be come a valuable marketing tool.

I’m sure the future uses are abundant, pending wide spread acceptance. I will be applying VoteLinks and other microformats here and in my other work from this point forward (where relevant).

If you are not employing microformats yet, or haven’t really looked into them, you get a great deal of information on microformats.org.

Usability, Web Standards html, microformats, semantics, user experience, Web Standards