On 3 Mar 99, Jason O Papadopoulos wrote:
> Excuse me if I sound a bit ignorant on some of these but I've been
> trying to find the logic and reasoning and I can't for the earth of me
> find "functional" as opposed to "annotational" purposes for some of these
> tags. Would someone be able to specify some web links or books with more
> information on what tags are available, how they should be used and what
> their purpose is?
>
> Thank you in advance for your help and understanding,
No, these are entirely valid questions, and ones to which it's hard
to find unambiguous answers. My understanding of meta tags (and in
particular their relationship to the upcoming Resource Description
Framework [RDF]) is patchy at best. But I'll try and give a rough
reply...
First, there are scores of meta tags in use on the Web; or more
accurately, scores of values for the two possible attributes of the
tag "meta" ("http-equiv" and "name"). But only a handful of them
have any particular functionality for most users; the rest are
special cases that have significance only for the organizations that
created them in the first place. Or they may have been coined in the
expectation that in time they would come to be generally recognized
by other servers, search engines, browsers and so on.
All meta tags are essentially "infomation about information". They
are non-printing bits of data describing aspects of the document
they're contained in -- when it "expires", its language, what
character set it uses, the author's e-mail, whatever. All are
intended to be "machine-readable"; that is, to convey identifying or
rendering information from one server to another, and/or to the
browser. But as I suggested above, almost no meta tags are
universally recognized. So it gets confusing.
The "generator" value that you mention is an especially useless bit
of information... the only conceivable purpose I've heard suggested
for it is that of software authors sending out spiders to see how
widely their particular editing application is used. Sounds pretty
far-fetched to me, really.
As best as I can tell, the only tags that are especially relevant to
most site developers are those values that some search engines
recognize: "keywords", "title", "description" and "robots". Also
useful are a "pragma" (prevents a page from being locally cached, NS
anyway), and of course good ol' "refresh". Perhaps "PICS-label" as
well, for content-rating.
As I say, my knowledge of this stuff is shaky. I stand to be
corrected on any or all points :)
-----------
Brent Eades, Almonte, Ontario
E-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Web: http://www.almonte.com/
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