Image Toolbar Header

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I’m doing some code cleanup around here, and I came to a line in my <head> that is soley to work around an Internet Explorer feature I don’t want on my site.

A highlighted example of an Internet Explorer image toolbar.

Here is the standard way to remove it:

<meta http-equiv="imagetoolbar" content="no" />

Since the http-equiv attribute is meant to be simply a document-level replacement for real HTTP headers, and I have the ability to send out real HTTP headers, I decided to try out removing this line and replacing it with this bit of PHP, which according to the spec is functionally equivilent:

<?php header ('imagetoolbar: no'); ?>

Looks funky, but according to the HTTP 1.1 specification user agents should ignore headers they don’t recognize, so there’s no harm. However in my testing I was disappointed (though not terribly surprised) to find that Internet Explorer did not respect the header. I have trimmed other parts of my markup quite a bit though, and I’m willing to sacrifice this one line.

More Googlebot Flailing

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Now I’m seeing the Googlebot request /about/ pages relative to known blogs that don’t have any links to any /about/ URI. The last time the Googlebot flailed around like this it was fun to watch for a little bit and wonder what they had cooking in the labs, but then it got annoying. I don’t know if there are rules of bot etiquette, but requesting imagined unlinked resources while spidering can’t be a best practice.

There is of course one blog vendor who consistently has about pages at /about/ URIs, and that’s Typepad. Now my question Google is: what should the rest of us do if we want our about pages indexed by this new system? Mine happens to be in the about subdirectory of my blog, but what about people who have about.html or about-me.php? Should I set up a permanent redirect for every blog I have redirecting to the real about page?

(Note: That’s faux indignation. I don’t have any juicy conspiracy theories, and I’m not really that peeved, mostly I’m just curious what they’re up to. However juicy conspiracy theories are welcome in the comments. [As long as they don’t make fun of me for noticing these things.] )

UPDATE: It just requested a non-existent non-linked /contact/ URI.

UPDATE: It just requested a non-existent non-linked /stats/ URI.

DEVELOPING . . .

A Bit Better

Asides

Feeling a bit better than yesterday, thanks for all the well-wishes. Geof said I probably needed sleep and my body would make me have it one way or another. He’s right, I think I’m about to crash again. Had a meeting today I had to go to, and it went well. Generally trying to stay away from the computer though, however today has been an interesting day. Today has been a domain-registering day, which is always a sign of exciting things to come. 🙂

Matt May on SVG

Asides

Matt May on Implementing SVG: “Hyatt is, of course, neglecting to mention that, alongside the KHTML engine Safari is based on, there is a KSVG engine. They wouldn’t have to reinvent the wheel to use that any more than they did to integrate KHTML.” My impression is they’ve put a lot of work into KHTML, but the point stands. Even a subset of SVG would be immmediately useful.