Re: Revised Beginner's Guide to HTML available for perusal
"Roy T. Fielding" <fielding@simplon.ICS.UCI.EDU>
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Date: Thu, 21 Apr 1994 14:12:56 --100
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From: "Roy T. Fielding" <fielding@simplon.ICS.UCI.EDU>
To: Multiple recipients of list <www-talk@www0.cern.ch>
Subject: Re: Revised Beginner's Guide to HTML available for perusal
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Dan Connolly writes:
> Agreed... if there are idioms we'd like to encourage/discourage,
> this is the sort of place to do it.
>
>>[John Lewis wrote:]
>>>Like mentioning the <HTML><HEAD>....</HEAD><BODY>......</BODY></HTML> tags,
>>>and their importance for the future.
>
> Could you expand on this? What is "their importance in the future"? I
> thought the purpose of HEAD was, for example, so you could find the
> TITLE without having to scan the whole doc -- once you'd found
> </HEAD>, you're done.
That is exactly why they are important. Both servers and tools that
wish to scan documents for metainformation should restrict themselves
to scan only properly-constructed <HEAD>...</HEAD> portions of documents,
stopping after the </TITLE> or X number of lines if <HEAD> does not occur
before then {X: X is just large enough to account for normal comments}.
Anything else is just too inefficient.
Once such servers and indexers exist, the need for those tags will become
obvious. A beginner's guide should look to the future requirements of
HTML documents, not just to the past.
...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>