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

rst@ai.mit.edu (Robert S. Thau)

Mail folder: WWW Talk Jan 94-present
Next message: Merry Cushing: "Subscribe to listserver..."
Previous message: heaney@gatwick.sgp.slb.com: "Access control and the CERN httpd"
Maybe in reply to: Roy T. Fielding: "Re: Future of meta-indices: site indexing proposal and Perl script "
Reply: lenst@lysator.liu.se: "Future of meta-indices: site indexing proposal and Perl script "

Errors-To: listmaster@www0.cern.ch
Date: Wed, 23 Mar 1994 16:49:44 --100
Message-id: <9403231546.AA03369@volterra>
Errors-To: listmaster@www0.cern.ch
Reply-To: rst@ai.mit.edu
Originator: www-talk@info.cern.ch
Sender: www-talk@www0.cern.ch
Precedence: bulk
From: rst@ai.mit.edu (Robert S. Thau)
To: Multiple recipients of list <www-talk@www0.cern.ch>
Subject: Future of meta-indices: site indexing proposal and Perl script 
X-Listprocessor-Version: 6.0c -- ListProcessor by Anastasios Kotsikonas
Content-Length: 1656

   Date: Wed, 23 Mar 1994 06:10:24 --100
   From: "Roy T. Fielding" <fielding@simplon.ics.uci.edu>

To summarize, Roy suggests adding a "header" attribute to <META>, so that

	<meta header name="Expires" value="Tue, 04 Dec 1993 21:29:02 GMT">

would cause a server to generate

	Expires: Tue, 04 Dec 1993 21:29:02 GMT

while it silently ignored <meta ...> tags without the header attribute, such as

	<meta name="IndexType" value="Service">

FWIW, that certainly sits fine with me, but it might be possible to
consider more general schemes.  So, for the sake of concreteness, I'll
propose a "purpose" attribute, whose value is a string defining the purpose
(or purposes) of this particular piece of meta-info.  A few things which it
might be reasonable to have in a document are:

   <meta purpose="header" name="Expires" value="Tue, 04 Dec 1993...">
   <meta purpose="index" name="Type" value="service">

and even

   <meta purpose="index,header" name="Keywords"
         value="metaindex, resource discovery, DTD syntax">

(The last one might be cleaner as <meta purpose="header" purpose="index"...>;
I did it as a single CDATA string assumed to contain a comma-separated list
of purposes simply to make it easier to type in manually).

Either Roy's scheme or mine is adequate to my current needs, of course, but
a purpose attribute may cope perhaps a little more gracefully when the
*third* use for explicit metainformation in HTML+ documents comes along...

   ...Roy Fielding   ICS Grad Student, University of California, Irvine  USA
		      (fielding@ics.uci.edu)
       <A HREF="http://www.ics.uci.edu/dir/grad/Software/fielding">About Roy</A>

rst