[whatwg] <meta name="description" href="#desc" />

[Roger Hågensen]

On 2010-03-18 13:13, Julian Reschke wrote:
> On 18.03.2010 03:37, Roger Hågensen wrote:
>> I searched the list, and looked at the HTML5 briefly and found nothing,
>> nor can I ever recall such.
>> So this is both a question and a proposal.
>>
>> On my own site currently I mostly replicate the first paragraph of an
>> article in my journal as the meta description,
>> and write one up for other pages, usually replicating some of the 
>> content.
>> ...
>
> See related W3C bug: 
> <http://www.w3.org/Bugs/Public/show_bug.cgi?id=7577>.
>
> Best regards, Julian
>

Thanks Julian, looking at that found me the link to: 
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-html/2009Aug/0990.html
It suggests <link rel="description" href="#desc" />, which is ok I guess.

But why not simply allow this instead:
<meta name="description" href="#desc" />

Existing parsers would notice that content="" is missing which is stated 
as being required,
parsers that have been updated would notice there is a href="" instead,
so search engines could just look for that id in the page.
I think this would have the highest success rate.

If backwards compatibility is such a major concern then this could be done:
<meta name="description" content="" href="#desc" />

I'm unsure what gives the best result for varous parsers though,
would empty content make them behave the same as if the meta tag was not 
there at all?
Or would a empty tag cause them to use "" as the actual page description?

I'd prefer to have the content attribute missing instead myself, but...

Regards,
Roger.

-- 
Roger "Rescator" Hågensen.
Freelancer - http://EmSai.net/