Re: Meta Tag - proposal (suggestions ???)

Joe Budge (budge@clark.net)
Wed, 15 Nov 1995 17:23:42 -0500


> From: davidmsl@anti.tesi.dsi.unimi.it (Davide Musella)
> Subject: Meta Tag - proposal (suggestions ???)
> To: www-html@w3.org (Mailing list di html)
> Date: Mon, 13 Nov 1995 12:29:33 +0100 (MET)
> Organization: Dept. of Computer Science, Milan, Italy.

> Request for comments, suggestions, etc...

The META tag could benefit greatly from HTTP-EQUIV's for "revision"
(as in 'revision number') and 'timestamp' (as in 'date/time the
document was authored').

Librarians -- electronic or otherwise -- keep track of different
versions of a document in many professions. This is crucial in
situations where one needs to track changes in documents over
time -- as frequently happens in legal, engineering, purchasing, and
technical support activities. I would rate the importance of these
as "high" since one cannot do serious document management
without these concepts.

An interesting "nice" feature would be an HTTP-EQUIV for 'period' (as
in 'the document covers the stated period'). This would be used to
organize information so that one can organize/retrieve by historical
time period (eg: "give me all documents where 'title' contains
'United Nations' and 'period' contains '1945').


> [...]

> This attribute binds the element to an HTTP response header. If the semantics
> of the HTTP response header named by this attribute is known, then the
> contents can be processed based on a well defined syntactic mapping, whether
> or not the DTD includes anything about it. HTTP header names are not case
> sensitive. If absent, the NAME attribute should be used to identify this
> meta-information and it should not be used within an HTPP response header.
> It is possible to use any text string, but if you want to define these
> properties you have to use the following words:
>
> keywords: to indicate the keywords of the document
> author: to indicate the author of the document
> expire: to indicate the expire date of the document
> language: to indicate the language of the document
> abstract: to indicate the abstract of the document
> organization: to indicate the organization of the author
> public (yes,no): to indicate if the document is available to averybody
> or not