Re: META

Terry Allen (terry@ora.com)
Wed, 28 Jun 95 10:15:25 EDT

One wants to be able to mark up the contents of META (and thus it
or some other element, to be invented, needs to allow content)
because such undeniably common pieces of metadata as Title and
Publisher may need to require such things as italics and superscripts.
Even Subject could require superscripts.

As it is understood in current metadata proposals that one cannot
define all the types of metadata that could be required, there are
sure to be other types that will also require inline markup.

That's why I suggested %text; as content; perhaps %font; would do
as well.

Albert's survey does suggest that META is currently in use; I would
not call that "unsanctioned" as Stu did, though I agree with Stu that
a small amount of use would not be an insuperable obstacle to changing
the specification of META (*not* for 2.0 ...).

However, it would be really bad design to create a new element to do
what META doesn't quite do right. Maybe our process here doesn't allow
us to do better, and much of HTML is already frozen for all time.
I hope not.

Regards,

-- 
Terry Allen  (terry@ora.com)   O'Reilly & Associates, Inc.
Editor, Digital Media Group    101 Morris St.
			       Sebastopol, Calif., 95472


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