[whatwg] <summary> tag to help avoid redundancy of meta description tag!?

Fri Mar 19 07:43:20 PDT 2010

On 2010-03-19 15:17, Ashley Sheridan wrote:
> Search engines and people are not the only content parsers. Sure, you 
> would expect a parser to maybe look further into the content if the 
> description meta tag was missing, but imagine if a parser had to do 
> this for all the content it looked at? There are still overheads to 
> consider.
>
> Why not just use server-side code to output the first paragraph of 
> content as the description for the page also?
>
> I just feel that the <head> and <body> areas of a page have two 
> distinct uses, and unnecessary crossovers shouldn't occur if it's 
> avoidable.

True, but there is also such a thing as uneeded redundancy, sure 
repeating the same info in the meta tags which is also in the document 
may not add that many KB,
but with increasing number of page requesters that really pile up the 
bandwidth total. Something both users and hosters and ISPs should have 
an interest in right?
If you look at my other thread Re: [whatwg] <meta name="description" 
href="#desc" />
It allows notifying the parser that the content is in the page, and it 
is up to the parsers configuration whether to scan beyond the header in 
that case. Best of both worlds IMO.

Roger.

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