Organizing Web Information

[Marc Salomon]

Hal Kirkwood <hkirk at uno.cc.geneseo.edu> wrote:
|I have used some Meta tags and have tried the IDML...the IDML seems a bit
|less unwieldy as compared to the Meta tags.  Is it the end all be all for
|indexing sites....no...at least not yet.

IDML specifies a data model, an enumeration of a set of  elements, just like
the Dublin Core[1] or the Warwick Framework[2].  All of these schemes also
describe encoding formats for those data models, at least using the <yecch>
<META> facility of HTML.

One limitation to using the <META> element is that its content model is EMPTY,
which is why you never see a </META>.  EMPTY SGML elements can be significant
by their mere existance <HR>, or can be expressive through their SGML
attributes as in <IMG SRC="mypic.gif">.  But there is a limit to the size of an
SGML attribute (I think its something like 70-80 bytes), so a general purpose
metadata format this is not.

-marc
[1] http://www.uic.edu/~cmsmcq/tech/metadata.syntax.html
[2] http://www.ub2.lu.se/tk/warwick.html

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