Re: META

Albert Lunde (Albert-Lunde@nwu.edu)
Tue, 27 Jun 95 23:37:30 EDT

> At 5:28 PM 6/27/95, Terry Allen wrote:
> >However, as META is not widely used for anything yet (or is it?),
> >we could contemplate a backward-incompatible change to it,
> >especially as a patch for docs should be little required and
> >very simple.
>
> META is used in at least MOMspider, Harvest (see the documentation for the
> SGML-based HTML summarizer), and John Franks wn server.

I did a Lycos search looking for more real-world examples, and following
up on a lead in www-talk archives, I found that the META tag is being
used by Verity's "Topic WebSearcher" software. It looks from the blurbs
on http://www.verity.com/ that this is a current commercial product.

Another reference leads me to beleive that ALIWEB is indexing using
META tags (see: http://www.webcom.com/html/meta.html )

I should also have remembered that META tags are used in several
Netscape hacks (i.e. http-equiv="Refresh" ).

I found the META tag used on real documents at other sites, including
http://www.ibm.com/ and http://www.microsoft.com/. (The latter
case may have been created by Internet Assistant for Word 1.00.)

I found a prior thread on meta in the working group archives where
Roy Fielding says: ... "It is currently used within thousands,
if not hundreds of thousands, of HTML documents world-wide and many tools
exist which require META." ....

http://www.acl.lanl.gov/HTML_WG/html-wg-94q3.messages/0125.html

(This also offers some history of the tag)

I'm inclined to think that META has escaped out of the lab into
the wild.

-- 
    Albert Lunde                      Albert-Lunde@nwu.edu