Re: META

Tom Magliery (mag@ncsa.uiuc.edu)
Tue, 27 Jun 95 16:42:06 EDT

The unfortunate problem with META is that it's currently defined as an
empty element. I certainly have no problem with changing it, but isn't
that the sort of thing that throws people into fits about "breaking
existing documents" and so on?

What about a new head element that would serve exactly as Eric suggested --
to allow for unspecified structural content? I have thought about
"METADATA" as a possible name for it.

Yeah, it'd be kind of weird to have both "META" and "METADATA". But for
the purposes of researchers into the issues surrounding metadata in
general, a 1024-character string (the CONTENT attribute of META) is simply
not good enough. (Not even close.)

GA>Well, META is in HEAD so it's already non-displaying. [Unless one
GA>has a broken user agent.]

I agree. I've been haggling with our developers forever. :-/

According to the 2.0 DTD, TITLE is the only HEAD element that allows
content. Furthermore, I don't think the 2.0 spec indicates anywhere that
spurious head content should not be rendered. I'm not saying I agree with
this, just that that's what the spec says.

mag

--
Tom Magliery ** NCSA ** 605 E Springfield ** Champaign IL 61820 ** USA
                     "It works in Netscape."