First, apologies from the user guide group for nt responding to the
various syntax proposals (eg, Type vs Scheme, and placement of
qualifiers in the META tag's content attribute). We'd been pursuing a
different line of inquiry for some time and needed to see it through a
bit further before pausing in our (need I say?) very busy lives to give
the other proposals the responses they deserved. I'm in England
ostensibly on vacation before the Z39.50 and DELOS (metadata) meetings
next week, and since I'm sitting in a cafe with a spotty internet
connection, I'll keep this brief.
The User Guide is not a proper "user guide" yet. For one thing it's a
rough draft. For another, it has a couple extraneous working sections
temporarily thrown in simply because the guide is a convenient vehicle
for supporting arguments (eg, describing the question for which
metadata is the answer) and exploratory contextual scenarios (eg,
Warwick framework). These sections won't be appropriate in the final
guide. BTW, as mentioned before, a very short, quick-reference-style
version of the guide is envisioned.
A couple of points then, while my connection lasts. In the guide, the
convention of prepending "dc." to element names was taken straight out
of the agreement reached at the Boston W3C searching and indexing
meeting. The guide's use of META for encoding metadata doesn't break
any browsers (that I know of). It also says that the included notation
is one of several, so an SGML notation is certainly not precluded.
I believe Terry was concerned about the use of META outside a document
that it was describing; apparently there's a rule that META cannot
describe another document not included in the same HTML file (is that
right?) -- the way out is to say that the file containing the META tag
is not an HTML file (it just bears a remarkable resemblance to one).
That's all I can manage over this telnet connection just now. Maybe
some other members of the user guide group will have something to add.
-John
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