Re: The Title header

On Fri, 19 Jul 1996, John Franks wrote:

> In fact, I would find an argument to make it mandatory persuasive.

I wouldn't be happy about any change to http which made analysis of the
content of a file mandatory. We should not demand that servers 
analyze HTML.

And in current practice, my experience as the designer of a search 
tool is that titles are used to provide meaningful captions on browser
screens not sumarize the document content which would be useful for
search engines.

I haven't looked at the mime spec so it may already agree with me ... but
if HTTP were to include a header relating to title or document content
it should be clearly a document description which might be provided by
a server and might (NOT mandatory) be provided by content analysis or
meta data stored by the server external to the document. It should not
be directly specified as being a particular element of a particular 
content type.

Dave Morris

Received on Friday, 19 July 1996 12:33:08 UTC