Spoiler is a hateful activity on the internet. Someone who intentionally wants to spoil your movie/tv show/sports expectation by revealing the result deserves the hate. But what about the unintentional one?
Every weekend I watch European football games, and once in a couple I watch Formula 1 GP races. And every monday, shows like Heroes, Chuck and Prison Break. What I usually do, after the live show ended and before I actually watch it, is to shutdown my RSS feed reader and twitter app so as I won't be spoiled by Sports news RSS feed or my friends' twittering "OMG congrats to Raikkonen for the win!"
But I sometimes forget about it, or accidentally clicked the link, and see the results, that really spoils my watching experience. It's something fundamentally hard to avoid, since we have timezone differences, and we love to discuss about TV or cinema movies on blogs. There's nothing wrong about it.
What we usually do is to add a big "SPOILER" warning in the title or beginning of the post. Some neat people like to mark up the spoilers so as the text won't appear until you drag your mouse to select it. I believe some movie review sites like IMDB allows users to check the box "this is a spoiler" and provide some javascript so it won't be displayed until the user agrees to see. Is there a possibility to do this with microformats?
I saw a mention of microformat about NSFW (not safe for work) links. I haven't followed the discussion in details and am not sure if there's a concensus about it, but adding a markup to the links that are not safe for people in the office seems like a good idea to agree on.
Can we do this for spoilers as well? Something like:
<span class="spoiler" title="Spoiler about F1 Brazil GP" spoiler:about="http://www.formula1.com/">OMG Raikonen won the F1 Brazil GP race! The race was so exciting.</span>
That way you can add user-defined CSS stylesheet to turn the text into the same color as background, or can easily build a browser extension to give you a dialog saying "This page has a spoiler about http://www.formula1.com/. Do you want to see it?" Of course you can add the class tag to elements like div or p, or even A tag links, where you won't have any spoiler in the current page but the links might contain the spoilers. Very close to that NSFW microformats isn't it?
We obviously will have a namespace problem with spoiler:about's URI value, since there are lots of ways to refernece the same event, probably using URLs like Upcoming, Wikipedia or Google search results. But I think it should be just optional anyway, since you can just specify the content using title attribute for that.
Thoughts? Is it a good idea, or something doable with existent POSH standards etc.? Just looked at hReview, but couldn't find any mention of spoilers. xFolk might be good for tagging outgoing urls, but wonder how we can do that to markup the part of the page.
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