Re: META tag question

James K. Tauber (jtauber@cyllene.uwa.edu.au)
Wed, 29 Nov 1995 03:28:14 +0800 (WST)


On Tue, 28 Nov 1995, Mary Morris wrote:
> Is it legal to have multiple META tags with the same HTTP-EQUIV
> field?
>
> ie would this be legal
>
> <META HTTP-EQUIV="Subject.scheme" CONTENT="Dewey Decimal System">
> <META HTTP-EQUIV="Subject" CONTENT="004.64">
> <META HTTP-EQUIV="Subject.scheme" CONTENT="Some other system">
> <META HTTP-EQUIV="Subject" CONTENT="Model Trains">

Legal, yes, but probably not what you want. A field can be listed more
than once iff it's possible to list it exactly once with all the values
comma delimited.

So the above is legal if the following is. And the above would be treated
as the follow by compliant systems.

<META HTTP-EQUIV="Subject.scheme"
CONTENT="Dewey Decimal System, Some other system">
<META HTTP-EQUIV="Subject"
CONTENT="004.64, Model Trains">

> If not, can you make the HTTP-EQUIV field Subject and the
> Name field each of those?

Servers will generally ignore your NAME attribute (which won't do much
good as that's where you want the information for robots, etc.)

> Or could you do it like the following?
>
> <META HTTP-EQUIV="Subject.DDS.scheme" CONTENT="Dewey Decimal System">
> <META HTTP-EQUIV="Subject.DDS" CONTENT="004.64">
> <META HTTP-EQUIV="Subject.SOS.scheme" CONTENT="Some other system">
> <META HTTP-EQUIV="Subject.SOS" CONTENT="Model Trains">

Why not just:

<META HTTP-EQUIV="DDS" CONTENT="004.64">
<META HTTP-EQUIV="SOS" CONTENT="Model Trains">

?

Is there something significant about starting with "Subject" that I don't
know about? (quite likely :-)

James K. Tauber <jtauber@cyllene.uwa.edu.au>
Programmer and CWIS Officer
University Computing Services
University of Western Australia