Re: Future of meta-indices: site indexing proposal and Perl script

Larry Masinter <masinter@parc.xerox.com>
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Date: Wed, 23 Mar 1994 02:30:31 --100
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From: Larry Masinter <masinter@parc.xerox.com>
To: Multiple recipients of list <www-talk@www0.cern.ch>
Subject: Re: Future of meta-indices: site indexing proposal and Perl script 
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'meta' is one of those words that evaporates when you look at it.
Everything is either 'information' or 'metainformation'; just as we
don't enclose the entire document in a <information ...> tag, we
shouldn't encode metainformation in a <meta ...> tag.

There are lots of *kinds* of information that are currently lumped
together under the umbrella term of "meta-information". Some of it is
related to the content of the document (its current representation,
the title, number of authors, etc.), some to the context of the
production of the document (date of first publication), and some to
the current instance (price of the document for various pricing
strategies.) 

Content-related information might arguably appear in the body of the
document, while contextual information (which might change from
instance to instance or time to time) probably shouldn't.

The fact that we talk about 'meta-information' doesn't mean that it
should appear in a particular place in the protocol labelled as
"meta".