Re: A question/suggestion for HTML 2.0 or 3.0

John Franks (john@math.nwu.edu)
Thu, 17 Aug 1995 13:07:56 -0500


In article <v0213050cac5928838c71@[192.88.238.59]>, J. Casey wrote:
> At 15:59 17/8/95, Michael Mealling wrote:
> >I'm sitting here hacking Mosaic code so that it can understand URCs and
> >it occurs to me that a very powerful addition to the Anchor tag would
> >be a META attribute that specifies meta-information that is not within
> >the document itself.

You might be interested in a little known and little used feature of the
WN server which provides the functionality you want as a parameter
to any URL it serves. Simply adding an "info" parameter to the end of any URL
automatically provides a URL to meta information about the document.

For example, try

http://hopf.math.nwu.edu/index.html;info

It might well be that "meta" would have been a better name than "info."
This might also avoid some of the debate about whether it is an HREF
itself. Something like this could be very useful if it were standardized
and browsers supported it.

>
> But this has the problem that the author of a document has no control over
> the meta information associated with the document. Having meta information
> specified in
> the HEAD as an associated LINK'ed resource would seem to be the correct
> way to do this.
>

This is not of any use for non-HTML documents though. How would you
provide meta information about a GIF file? On the other hand

http://hopf.math.nwu.edu/logo.gif;info

works fine.

-- 

John Franks Dept of Math. Northwestern University john@math.nwu.edu