Why would you have difficulty? It *does* request pages "blindly",
without requiring human intervention from page to page. It could as
well request (oh my favorite examples) CGI info2html, or links that
expire by second.
Even if you do have problems *calling* it a robot, it should still
follow the same rules, no matter what you call it.
> >By this definition, Navigator's "Check for changes in my bookmarks"
> >feature is a robot, and I am of the opinion that it should check for
> >/robots.txt.
> Again, these pages were retrieved by a human the first time. Now the same
> user just repeats the same retrievals in a slightly less RSI-inducing
> fashion. So what makes these cases so different that server admins
> would want to administer them differently?
The difference is that there may be no need to get them (see the above
two examples). If I want a page to read it, or to store it, it's OK.
If any kind of software "decides" to request it (yes, even if I did
request it 1/2 hour ago), IMHO it should follow RES.
> To me what makes a robot a robot is that it retrieves a page, greps
> for (non-inline) links, and wants to retrieve _those_. So it's an
> initial retrieval, followed by non-human-controlled further retrievals.
> And for the hecklers among us, no I don't even pretend that that is
> a complete unambiguous and correct definition.
Your definition narrows the robot category, but it's as valid as the
former definition. I prefer the former, stricter wording, since I
think it depicts better what kind of software should follow RES, not
the term "robot" itself.
-- Hrvoje Niksic <hniksic@srce.hr> | Hocemo 101-icu! --------------------------------+-------------------------------- "Psychos _do not_ explode when sunlight hits them." _________________________________________________ This messages was sent by the robots mailing list. To unsubscribe, send mail to robots-request@webcrawler.com with the word "unsubscribe" in the body. For more info see http://info.webcrawler.com/mak/projects/robots/robots.html