"Marc Salomon" <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> While some authoring tools might not preserve the author's intended ordering
> in encoding <META> tags into the HTML document instance, broken software is no
> reason lose this feature of HTML as an application of SGML in designing a
> metadata encoding syntax.
A goal stated at Warwick was that whatever we came up with had to work
with existing software. Asking Netscape to change their browser was out --
more importatly, asking Microsoft to change Internet Assistant for Word or
Microsoft FrontPage was out, too.
We are not driving the tool-makers (with very few exceptions)... we have
to work with what is out there.
[...]
> vertigo is a polite word for the feeling
> I get when I see element names that begin to look like DNS entries and content
> that looks like its trying out for a spot in a LISP program.
It's true that it's not as nice as we would like. The external format that
Lou, Eric, Michael & I came up with was cleaner because it didn\t have to
live within HTML 2.0 documents. But we _do_ need to put this stuff into
HTML 2.0 documents, and in practice _cannot_ rely on the META elements in
a HEAD not to get reordered, or not to get interspersed with other elements
such as adverts for the editing software used (yes, really).
Finally, people need to be able to have more than one kind of metadata
within their documents. Lycos and Yahoo already understand soe
combinations such as META name=author, but do not understand it to mean
what would be meant by META name=dc.author, for example.
Unless we want to rename the DC elements so that NAME is e-mail address of
the typist (for example -- search engines differ), we need the prefix there.
I would prefer to be able to combine prefix and scheme:
<META NAME=dc.author.telephone content="+39 11 22 33 4455">
rather than
<META NAME=dc.author content="(type=telephone) +39 11 22 33 4455 ">
but I don't see it getting much simpler than that.
Before we go any further on this, though, we need to agree that we have
stopped changing DC itself.
Lee
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