An open letter to Jack Dorsey

Right now Facebook is completely dominating us. There’s no good outlet for blog posts that integrates well with FB because they don’t allow linking in their timeline posts.

If you look through Facebook, you won’t find many outbound links, they do all kinds of things to discourage it.

So they’re turning the web into a Facebook thing. Because that’s where we have to post to get engagement. But we can’t use the rest of the web. And that’s the problem.

Vote Links

VoteLinks is an elemental microformat, one of several microformat open standards. We propose a set of three new values for the rev attribute of the <a> (hyperlink) tag in HTML.

The new values are “vote-for” “vote-abstain” or “vote-against”, which are mutually exclusive, and represent agreement, abstention or indifference, and disagreement respectively.

A link without an explicit vote ‘rev’ value is deemed to have value “vote-for” or “vote-abstain”, depending on the application.

Additional human-readable commentary can be added using the existing ‘title’ attribute, which most browsers show as a rollover.

Examples:

<a rev="vote-for" href="http://example.com/cheesevote"  
   title="Melt the cheese!">Do it!</a>
<a rev="vote-against" href="http://example.com/cheesevote"  
   title="Don't melt the cheese!">Don't do it!</a>