#microformats 2024-02-02

2024-02-02 UTC
gRegorLove_, [tantek], gRegor, [Al_Abut], Game, vhbelvadi, [pfefferle], [KevinMarks], Guest6, BIC, [Jo] and [snarfed] joined the channel
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[snarfed] nudges [j12t], he's discussing elsewhere how to "determine the canonical url among several pages pairwise related by rel=me"
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[snarfed] do we have that? afaik representative h-card is related but not the same
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[tantek] snarfed, we do, via the original identity consolidation in XFN
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[snarfed] looking at https://microformats.org/wiki/identity-consolidation , https://gmpg.org/xfn/and/#idconsolidation
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[tantek] yes
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[snarfed] those are good, but I'm not seeing where they describe how to determine, of a set of pages that rel-me link to each other, which of those pages is the canonical/primary one
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[tantek] yeah it's implied by the star formation, that consuming code can detect stars and their centers
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[tantek] leaving that to already solved graph algorithms as it were rather than restating
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[snarfed] ah ok. but people often link to multiple of their profiles, back and forth, so often you don't have an exact minimal star
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[tantek] back and forth is a feature of XFN
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[KevinMarks] So pagerank for rel-me
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[tantek] point being, you should be able to detect the center by a relatively simple inbound links sort
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[tantek] no need for pagerank pfaffing about
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[snarfed] I'm confused. so you detect the center by the one with the most inbound links?
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[snarfed] seems ok, but the non-determinism is uncomfortable
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[snarfed] rel=canonical was the other proposal
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[tantek] that's literally what the star formation indicates yes
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[tantek] nah rel=canonical is for duplicate content
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[tantek] and does not solve anything differently
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[KevinMarks] The most bidirectional links. You can spam inbound links
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[snarfed] oh, two different things. if you _only ever_ link from silo profiles back to your web site, then yes, that perfect minimal star is deterministic and feels ok
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[tantek] the most inbound links from the collection you crawl obviously starting from one
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[snarfed] but if your silo profiles sometimes link to each other, and then you're using the one with the highest link count...I dunno. I get it, but it still feels uncomforable
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[tantek] no one but the big search engines (and some LLM trainers) care about the whole "crawl the whole web" scenario any more
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[KevinMarks] You have the Chris and Tara problem if people aren't careful
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[snarfed] would be nice to be more explicit, but silo profile links generally don't let you add metadata to links. I dunno
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[tantek] nah, that's by design. if you all you have are silo profiles that link to each other and that fails to find a center, congratulations, you have your answer, you have no center
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[tantek] it's very zen 🙂
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[snarfed] 🤷 not my use case, I should defer to [j12t]
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[snarfed] I guess my one note would be that this idea ^ isn't on either of those pages, so if it's established and we like it, it might be worth writing up
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[KevinMarks] Interesting selection pressure. It would favour omg.lol over LinkTree and http://about.me
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[snarfed] esp the quantitative "count inbound links" part
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[tantek] [snarfed] feels like an obvious conclusion from first principles and math? or is that too much to ask for lol
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[snarfed] make the implicit explicit
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j12t You beat me to it Ryan :-)
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j12t My proposal for determining the canonical url among several pages pairwise related by rel=me would be: 1) use a star topology: the canonical is in bidirectional relationships with all others, and the non-canonical only with the canonical 2) when you come across a page with rel=me: if it has one rel=me, follow it. If it has more than one, you have the canonical one. Max one hop. Fails if you have exactly two pages in the set, but I could live
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j12t with that. (Or repeat the statement on the canonical one)
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[KevinMarks] Might be worth codifying the implicit rel=me if a silo only allows one link that was in the initial proposal
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[tantek] [KevinMarks] the original XFN identity consolidation page does that already
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[tantek] j12t also fails when people only have silo profiles that all link to each other, which is ok. like I said, in that case they have no canonical identity, the silos own them
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[tantek] also prototype proposals are fine, but I'd be hesitant to document any such brainstorms as "this is the way" or as a precise algorithm until folks have actually built prototypes and played with them across multiple examples to see how they work
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[tantek] prematurely artificially precise algorithms etc. written down a priori are nearly guaranteed to be wrong / fail when they encounter real data
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j12t I'm not attempting to standardize anything, just wonder whether there is a best practice.
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[tantek] Best practice(s) for whom or implementing which use-case?
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[snarfed] sounded like the use case was determining the "canonical" or "primary" or "preferred" URL in a rel-me cluster
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j12t Best practice for anybody for any use case. Just trying to understand the state of the art.
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[tantek] helps to document the use-cases first. [snarfed] that's close but sounds like a developer use-case, not a user use-case.
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[tantek] like for what user feature purpose does it matter to determine 'the "canonical" or "primary" or "preferred" URL in a rel-me cluster' ?
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[tantek] since users don't typically care about such cjargon
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[tantek] jargon*
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[tantek] j12t "any use case" is too broad