On Sat, 7 Sep 1996, Rzepa, Henry wrote:
> The flame castigated me for not being consistent, ie in advocating a rich
> chemistry dtd, so rich it appears NOT to need any metadata and
> yet also proposing that chemists think about metadata in a much
> less rich language such as HTML. On the face of it, we appear to
> be trying to do the same thing twice.
>
> Hence, is it true that if a particular subject has available a rich
> dtd, and is prepared to solve its own robot/indexing problems,
> metadata is irrelevant.
The Chemistry DTD maybe very rich and complex, but are you sure it has all
the metadata everyone might want? Does it include terms and conditions
information, administrative metadata, PIC, etc? Is it easily extensible
as new metadata needs appear? Also you might have your own chemistry
robot/index but you're still probably going to want to interoperate with
other indexs and robots (not everything is chemsitry and I'm sure even the
most harden chemist access non-chemistry-specific data sources from time
to time). To my mind, this points to the need to extract the metadata
from your rich chemistry DTD into other metadata formats. So I'd say
that metadata is far from irrelevant. You've just made life easy for
yourself by having all this metadata handy in the document conforming to
your rich DTD. :-)
> My initial feeling was that HTML is not going to go away, even
> for chemists, and in fact we DO have two separate problems to
> solve. But would this forum feel that metadata in HTML is
> really only a recognition of the inadequacies of HTML and the
> fact that HTML has evolved more and more away from marking
> up content, and more into marking up style?
I don't think that HTML is going to be going away any time soon either.
I like to think of us as sort of "retrofitting" the metadata features we
need into HTML 2.0 (using the META element) and coming up with the
metadata support we'd like to see in future HTML versions. However I do
agree with you that HTML has definately become more style (rendering)
oriented that content markup oriented. But I guess that's where the
commercial tool manufacturers' marketing departments have decided all of
the dosh is. The academic community is probably the biggest group
wanting better content markup (especially the desire for MATHs markup
that many science and engineering disciplines could make good use of).
Tatty bye,
Jim'll
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Jon "Jim'll" Knight, Researcher, Sysop and General Dogsbody, Dept. Computer
Studies, Loughborough University of Technology, Leics., ENGLAND. LE11 3TU.
* I've found I now dream in Perl. More worryingly, I enjoy those dreams. *
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