Bloglines are proposing an RSS/Atom extension element for feed access control, essentially:
<access:restriction relationship="deny" />
The intention is for this to be used when the publisher doesn't want any indexing or republishing of their feed.
Alex Barnett is critical, and though I agree with his point that the syndication/search tools should be working on better indexing, I'm not sure that means this proposal is a bad idea.
My first impression was that this was probably a good idea, but after a couple of minutes thought I'm having my doubts. A good touchstone for proposals like this is the question "would it work for HTML?". Well yes I think it would, at least to the extent that robots.txt currently works, in fact there's already the HTML <head> advice, e.g.
<meta name="robots" content="noindex,nofollow" />
Architecturally it's probably a bit neater than robots.txt (because it doesn't hijack URI space). I think there is a social problem though, highlighted by the words of this post from Marshall Kirkpatrick:
âEverything you blog goes on your permanent record!â How many times have we heard that lately? From employment to family situations, many people have been frustrated to find out that things they intended to write for a personal audience is now discoverable by anyone in the world via search engines. Bloglines proposed a new standard tonight to change that.
Nope. The Bloglines proposal does absolutely nothing for authorization. The element is purely advisory, optional. Maybe Google won't index the stuff directly (assuming they support the proposal), but if someone else republishes with a tool that doesn't recognise the extension then that might well get indexed. Post hoc it may help legal action against people that have republished on copyright grounds, but even there it doesn't really add much.
So although so far I can't see any problem with this proposal on technical grounds, the fact that its capability is likely to be misunderstood probably outweighs its potential benefit. Probably best just to use HTTP Digest or robots.txt (depending on what you want).
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