[whatwg] [WA1] Idea: meta attribute

Tue Aug 23 16:51:31 PDT 2005

On Tue, 2 Aug 2005, Matthew Raymond wrote:
>
> I've been noticing that a lot of metadata gets repeated in the web 
> pages. For instance, the copyright notice you have at the bottom of a 
> web page may be repeated in a <meta> element...
> 
> In <head>:
> | <meta name="copyright"
> |  content="Copyright © 2005 by Matthew Raymond.">
> 
> In <body>:
> | <div id="copyright">
> |   Copyright © 2005 by Matthew Raymond.
> | </div>
> 
> This is a pain, because it increases the size of the document 
> unnecessarily. So, I was thinking that it would be nice if we could just 
> say that a specific element contains metadata of a particular type.

What's the advantage? Has any software ever used the <meta 
name="copyright"> data on a page anywhere?

Also, note that in theory, with microformats (named with profile="") one 
could do what you describe already with the class="" attribute.

(FWIW, XHTML2 has something like what you propose. They have defined it in 
a way that integrates with RDF, which is quite clever. If we were to add 
something like this, I'd suggest just being compatible with the XHTML2 
system, assuming they fix the issues Bjoern raised with it.)

-- 
Ian Hickson               U+1047E                )\._.,--....,'``.    fL
http://ln.hixie.ch/       U+263A                /,   _.. \   _\  ;`._ ,.
Things that are impossible just take longer.   `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'