Styrheim

Microformats.org defines the rel-tag: links with rel="tag".

When you define a rel link type, you automatically define it for rev too. From W3C:

Consider two documents A and B.
Document A: <LINK href="docB" rel="foo">
Has exactly the same meaning as:
Document B: <LINK href="docA" rev="foo">

So when I tag this entry with Tags, Technorati could use rev="tag" on the link back.

And I think they should. Because the Tags page contains many links. Some are links to pages with the Tags tag, others are not. A human can see the difference from the layout, but robots don't read layout. It would be useful for a search robot to know that all links with rev="tag" have something in common with each other, and with the last segment of the page's URL.

At Technorati, anyone can get a link back when they tag their own page. At sites like Hoppa, anyone can also tag their page as e.g. Search Engines. But that will not give an automatic link back, because Hoppa is edited. In such cases, rev="tag" would be even more valuable to search engines.

But to be tag compatible, the URL shuold probably have been http://hoppa.com/Search+Engines/. Still, Hoppa is better off than DMOZ, where the page that is listing weblog search engines has the tag Search_Engines, which is far more general than the content of the page.

Going 75 clicks above the Kuntaur Bridge? Stridsbåt 90 of the Royal Norwegian Navy arriving in Dakar for river warfare exercises.

All the blog location services I have seen assume that the entire blog is about the same place.

That does not fit this blog. Most entries, including this one, has no geographic significance. Those who have, refer to different places. Generally in about the same corner of the world, but I have also refered to both Tórshavn and Phnom Penh in the same sentence.

So I'd like the blog location services to look for microformatted positions in each micropublished blog entry, rather than finding the position in the head element of the HTML page.

Micropublishing: Publishing small pieces of information that do not get their context as part of a larger document?not as part of a larger text, nor pointed to from the previous part, of from a table of content. Rather, piece gets in context from indexing, tagging and searching.

This blog entry may serve as example. It is part of a blog, but is unrelated to most of the other items. The context is given by the Micropublishing tag and whatever search result or other link that might have led you here.

We may need more TLDs because there may be some level of trust in a TLD. You can trust a .fo second level domain to use only ASCII letters, you can trust a .no second level domain to use only English, Norwegian and Sami letters.

But what if ICANN grants something like the sTLD .сом? That would open for for funny domains like microsoft.сом

ICANN is said to have opened a can of worms by approving the 'language' top level domain .cat application. However, I do not find any such approval in the official ICANN announcements page.

The reality of this seems to be the the nation of Catalonia tries to get itself a kind of country code Top Level Domain under cover of the language code .cat.

What can I say? I live in the Faroe Islands, another stateless nation, but one that has its own ccTLD: .fo. So I find it very reasonable that Catalonia should have its own ccTLD too. Spain may be opposed to the idea, but so is Norway to the ccTLDs .bv and .sj. (The Bouvet Island is uninhabited. The unilaterally claimed Norwegian military base at Jan Mayen shares the .sj domain with the demilitarized Svalbard, which is under Norwegian control by multilateral treaty.)

I foresee a lot of creative applications for my.cat, everything.for.the.cat and everything.but.the.cat.

More interesting is the rush of political TLD applications to come. The Commanche nation will try to reclaim the .com domain. The Basque may settle for the .eus language domain, or try to reclaim the .eu domain. There is no general ISO language code for Sami, only codes for each language: sma, sme, smj and smn. Thus, the Sami clearly need the .sami TLD.

non-ASCII domain names

With the introduction of IDN and non-ASCII characters in domain names, there is a case for language based domains. Under .com, you can use the homoglyph pair c and с to mimic a famous software company: Miсrosoft.com.

ccTLDs are generally safer for IDN domains. E.g. .no specifies that only English, Norwegian and Sami characters can be used. Mixing Norwegian and Sami in one domain name is allowed, like in besøk-kárásjoga-biblioteahka.no. (IBM's demo page does not detect that the á and the ø are from different languages, because they are both from ISO-8859-1.) Homoglyphs betseen Norwegian and Sami is hardly any problem. But the .us domain may have a hundred or so native languages, and the .com has to deal with the entire UNICODE set.

So language based domains may reduce the danger of homoglyphic fakes by restricting their sub-domain names to one language. However, these language domains need not be top level domains. They could be sme.no, com.us, ca.es or no.no. (Many of these domain names are of course already taken.)

tags: Internationalized domain name Català Catalunya Top-level domain Country code top-level domain .cat Homoglyph .sami

Faroese bills are beautiful, but are increasingly hard to get.

tags: Paper Money