Of all the microformat specs, rel-nofollow has always been my least favorite. A lot of people don’t like rel-nofollow because it makes publishers even more prone to treat links as an implicit endorsement or agreement. And I share that concern, but my main problem with rel-nofollow is the first open issue on the microformat wiki: nofollow indicates a behavior rather than a relationship from which the behavior should be inferred as appropriate for the useragent.
HTML is for describing content. JavaScript or some other programming language should be used for describing behavior.
Philipp Lenssen recently suggested removing rel-nofollow from links after a certain amount of time, in an attempt to solve another problem with rel-nofollow: it’s generally used much too broadly. Because few of us have time to inspect every link submitted via an open comment form to see whether or not we want to apply rel-nofollow to the link, most publishers just apply it to all unverified links. Philipp’s logic is that a link published several days ago can be assumed to be okay (i.e. not spam), so we can go ahead and remove the rel-nofollow.
When I read this, I suddenly realized that rel-nofollow has already been made irrelevant by hAtom. Comments marked up in hAtom already have machine-readable dates attached, so consuming applications (e.g. search engines) could make date-based decisions about whether or not to follow the links. Those date-based decisions would be better at accurately excluding spam (and only spam) than the current decisions based on overly broad rel-nofollow markup. And as an added bonus, publishers get all the other benefits of hAtom, e.g. free comment feeds.
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