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Wow, this list is suddenly getting busy! > It's tag abuse because it waters down the semantics of Author (Author's > name) and [...] it makes it more difficult to extract information from the > (still underpowered) combination of attribute names, attribute values, and > internal, non-HTML syntax (in syntax-free DCese, element name, qualifier > names, and a potentially uncontrolled range of qualifier values). I don't think anyone is preventing you from making a suggestion for improving things. The goals here included (amongst others) * the ability to embed the information in HTML * recognise that META elements in HTML are in practice unordered * do not prevent possible external representations, such as the Warwick Framework (either in MIME or in SGML/XML) * be something that people could type in NOTEPAD if they had to * compatible with HTML 2.0, and not require any browser changes Recall that the first unrecognised element (in HTML 2.0) terminates the HEAD. Hence, we had to use only existing elements, and META was the obvious choice. But DC uses tuples longer than 2, and since there was objection to adding a new attribute (not HTML 2 any more), the embedded parentheses scheme was used. > I grant that you can reserve TYPE=name for the case now covered > by Author, but you still don't have a way to associate miscellaneous > author information with the author's name, a problem neither you > nor Jon answered. Yet if you add a pointer as a qualifier on > Author, you get precisely the association you need. I am not sure what yuo mean by a pointer here -- do you mean a reference to an external metadata object? But the information would not all be self-contained then, which was the idea of putting it into HTML in the first place. If we had thought that search robots would follow links to other files for metadata and apply it to HTML, and that authors would keep those files up to date, that would have been the preferred solution. > That shows that the tag abuse is deleterious. Not at all. It shows that you can imagine a solution to a different set of constraints and then say that your solution to that set of constraints is better than someone else's, designed for some other set of constraints. There is no reason why DC cannot say that the TYPE qualifier admits of related information. *Any* kind of search on HTML Author is better than what we have today. The longer we take to release something, the worse things get. > I Wasn't at Warwick, and have been unable to get a clear fix on what was > *decided* there. There's been a lot of discussion and further work; > isn't that all by way of presenting proposals to modify and extend DC 0.1? No. Or at least, I don't see it that way. There were proposals for concrete representations of the DC, and of ways to link it to and embed it within HTML files. There was also a group working on a User Guide. The suggestions for modifications have mostly come about as the people working on the User Guide found things that they felt were hard to document. What was decided at Warwick was that the various groups would go away & write reports. That's still in progress. The food at Radcliffe House was far better than that at the GCA "banquet" in Boston for SGML 96, by the way :-) Lee