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

Fri Mar 19 07:43:26 PDT 2010

On Fri, 2010-03-19 at 15:43 +0100, Roger Hågensen wrote:

> 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.
> 

I did see that, and it looks like a great idea, as it shouldn't really
break anything, and I saw that it should be possible to use for the
keywords too, which would fit perfectly with tag cloud systems used on a
page.

I would presume that this would cause the content parser (browser) to
strip any and all tags surrounding the marked content?

Thanks,
Ash
http://www.ashleysheridan.co.uk

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