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

Fri Mar 19 09:19:33 PDT 2010

On 2010-03-19 15:43, Ashley Sheridan wrote:
> 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
>

Well, looking at the example 
http://lists.whatwg.org/htdig.cgi/whatwg-whatwg.org/2010-March/025575.html
I remebeerd that thew title element may have html markup in it (seen it 
in the wild), so most parsers probably apply tag stripping to that already,
so yeah, stripping tags the parser do not want shouldn't be an issue really.

Roger.

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

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