> 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 ________________________________ Patrick H. Lauke Webmaster / University of Salford http://www.salford.ac.uk ****************************************************** The discussion list for http://webstandardsgroup.org/ See http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm for some hints on posting to the list & getting help ******************************************************
