[whatwg] Where did the "rev" attribute go?
Robin Lionheart
whatwg.list at robinlionheart.com
Wed Jul 12 07:57:08 PDT 2006
Henri Sivonen wrote:
> And then what? Why is it useful that a computer knows that a string on
> a Web page is a human name?
Off the top of my head, a couple possible benefits of tagging proper names:
* smarter search engines
(<name>Bill Gates</name> is not the words "bill" and "gates". Could
be beneficial to newspaper sites.)
* speech synthesis
(Surely there's a good reason CSS3 Speech has "interpret-as: name"
and VoiceXML has interpret-as="name")
* spell checking
(Usable by Web page editing software)
I expect the Semantic Web could work it into their
encapsulation-of-knowledge schemes.
> Do the benefits of the computer having such knowledge outweigh the
> cost of the human labor required to mark up names?
Good question. I expect many Web authors would not avail themselves of
the option of using <name> even if it were available.
> (If you really needed to figure out on a computer which strings are
> names, instead of requiring page authors to cooperate with you, you
> could get results by extracting clusters of capitalized words,
> matching them against a database of known first and last names and
> filling in the gaps by guessing. For example, you could guess that
> Krempeaux is a family name, because it is a capitalized word that
> follows two well-known given names.)
That probably wouldn't work better in running text than on a page of
capitalized titles or headlines like "Bush Administration Urges Congress
to Ratify Detainee Treatment".
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