[Catalog-sig] hash tags

[PJ Eby]

On Fri, Mar 8, 2013 at 4:17 PM, M.-A. Lemburg <mal at egenix.com> wrote:
> On 08.03.2013 20:16, PJ Eby wrote:
>> There is, as I said before, a MUCH simpler way to do this, that works
>> right now: put direct #md5 download links in your description, and
>> phase out the rel="" attributes altogether.
>
> No, that would be a pretty poor design :-)
>
> The rel="" attributes are good design, since they were meant for
> exactly this purpose (machine reading and understanding relations
> between origin and target).

That depends on the goal of your design.  If the goal is to phase out
offsite spidering by downloader tools in a reasonably easy and
low-cost way, introducing new API is not a good way to do it.

The simple way to do it is to replace download-time end-user
unsupervised spidering with upload-time or registration-time
author-supervised spidering, which requires only that the tools exist
and people be informed of them (and encouraged to use them).