I think it was Roy Fielding, actually, and META is now standard in 2.0.
See:
http://www.hal.com/%7Econnolly/html-spec/spyglass-19941014/HTMLSPEC_18.html
(but watch out! There are some typos in the examples.)
The relavent part of the DTD is:
<!ELEMENT META - O EMPTY -- Generic Metainformation -->
<!ATTLIST META
HTTP-EQUIV NAME #IMPLIED -- HTTP response header name --
NAME NAME #IMPLIED -- metainformation name --
CONTENT CDATA #REQUIRED -- associated information --
>
>2) Is it useful to standardize on some _minimum_ suggested tags
>(conforming with IAFA or with the feds GILS project) such as author, etc.
We didn't come up with any. The NAME attribute of META is unconstrained
(beyond the syntax of an SGML name -- so, for example, it's not
case sensitive).
>3) Are there HTML3.0 plans that would supercede all this (indexing tags
>in the body as part of <Hx> tags)
Dunno.
>After security, resource discovery (RD) is perhaps the biggest issue on
>the web. Mike Schwartz and the IRTF-RD group have a great project with
>Harvest:
> http://harvest.cs.colorado.edu/
>If use of META, or other hand-coded indexing, became even *mildly* used
>(i.e. on home pages, or built into WWW server setups), it would go a long
>way towards resource discovery. Not the whole way, but significant.
Agreed. That's why META is in there. We kicked around the idea
of a standard set of names, but we decided to let the market
decide instead.
Dan