> -----Original Message----- > From: Patrick Lauke > > From: designer > > > After looking at the site mentioned by Anthony (relating to > > standards and > > local government) I noticed a lot of meta tags on that site [ > > http://www.salford.gov.uk ] which I haven't seen before > [...] > > Forgive my ignorance on this, but can meta tags just be > > 'invented' and be > > acceptable 'standards'? > > Unless I'm mistaken, you can make up your own META if you want, > for whatever reason you may have (e.g. something specific to your > own site management / CMS tools, your internal search engine, etc). > > Of course, to be truly useful, the META should follow a formally > published standard (e.g. Dublin Core), but there's nothing stopping > you from writing your own standard - if people find it useful, they > may use it. But yes, I'd liken it to the way in which you can make > up your own elements in XML, but how it's only useful if two or more > people then agree to use the same format (and then you publish something > like a DTD or Schema, etc). > > The HTML4 spec also mentions the use of the profile attribute in > a document's HEAD, which can be used to give more context to META. > http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/struct/global.html#h-7.4.4 > (but again, nobody stops you from making up your own profile). > > Patrick
That's right. There are all sorts of metadata and subsets thereof, the most common standard being the Dublin Core. Vocabularies, Qualifiers, etc are used to extend and further define the core elements via subsets. And if you just can't get enough metadata, try this http://dublincore.org/2003/03/24/dces#title http://dublincore.org/2003/03/24/dces#creator The Semantic Web (W3C) version is all about metadata. It's not the same thing as we refer to when we talk about documents being semantically correct. In my opinion the W3C Semantic Web Initiative is an admission that the efforts to make a semantically rich web via semantically correct documents has failed. But I don't think the Semantic Web really addresses the root of the problem. The major problem is that metadata is not maintained at the file system level, and only at the document level. This makes it almost impossible to track versioning, history, and regenerate web sites and document sets, and everything else that is associated with proper document management. This is "supposed" to be addressed in the next version of MacX and Windows, but I doubt it. Also no CMS manages metadata at the filesystem or at the versioning level. Also see http://dublincore.org/usage/documents/overview/ http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/ http://www.w3.org/TandS/QL/QL98/pp/dstc.html http://www.medra.org/en/metadata.htm http://www.naa.gov.au/recordkeeping/gov_online/agls/summary.html http://www.edna.edu.au/metadata http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metadata_%28computing%29 http://home.wlu.edu/~blackmerh/meta/acs12vi.html http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2003/04/16/deviant.html ****************************************************** The discussion list for http://webstandardsgroup.org/ See http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm for some hints on posting to the list & getting help ******************************************************
