Gareth Simpson put together a slick little Greasemonkey user script to strike through any rel=”nofollow” links on any website. I quickly found that this didn’t quite work on all sites, especially WordPress sites.
The default for links in WordPress 1.5 blogs is rel="external nofollow". Because Gareth’s script was dependent on the rel attribute having the exact text nofollow, it failed on the newer WordPress sites.
There are other uses of the rel attribute as well. For example, Technorati Tags use a rel="tag" attribute. And the XHTML 1.0 Strict DTD states that the value of the rel attribute should be a “space-separated list of link types.” So you could put together something like rel="tag nofollow external", and it would be perfectly valid.
So instead of just complaining about the minor problem with Gareth’s excellent script, I created a version that works the way it should. See the Greasemonkey site for info on how to use the script. [Found here.]
