Re: META

Albert Lunde (Albert-Lunde@nwu.edu)
Tue, 27 Jun 95 17:43:28 EDT

At 3:26 PM 6/27/95, emiller@oclc.org wrote:
>It is desireable to allow the inclusion of non-displaying,
>self-descriptive information in network resources. The META tag is the
>logical (and, I believe, intended?) place for such descriptive
>information.
>
>We propose that META be specified as a non-displaying container of
>unspecified internal structure that will allow a variety of
>experimental approaches to inclusion of metadata in HTML documents.

If I understand you correctly, you are proposing adding a closing tag for
META, and not displaying the text in between.

There are several problems with this:

- it's a bit late to make changes in the HTML 2.0 DTD that aren't fixing
something clearly broken.

- Drafts with META in the present form have been circulated for a while and
META is actually in use by some tools and servers.

- Hiding infomation in attributes is a lot more likely to work across many
clients than depending on <HEAD> stuff to not be displayed or introducing
_any_ new container. The contents of unrecognized tags are supposed to be
treated like other text (though what this means in the <HEAD> is another
question.)

(I think we discussed this kind of issue before before with respect to
hiding style information.)

I can see possible uses for some general way of hiding things but I don't
see a way to introduce it now without it failing to work on some existing
clients.

(Someone else has addressed the SGML mechanisms (which exist and don't work))

---
    Albert Lunde                      Albert-Lunde@nwu.edu