meta/@name vs. meta/@description

I just did a View Source on articles on web sites of several major
magazines (People, Business Week, Newsweek, Der Speigel, Le Monde, The
Economist, Readers Digest, and Rolling Stone) and they all have at least a
few meta elements that use name and content attributes to store metadata,
and most have more than a few of them. For example, do a View Source of
http://www.businessweek.com/globalbiz/content/feb2007/gb20070205_807318.htm.

When XHTML 2 becomes a Recommendation, does this practice get deprecated
in favor of using meta/@property instead (in which case URLs should be
used instead of the tokens currently there)? If not, some sort of
distinction between the two practices should be spelled out officially,
because otherwise there's a lot of room for confusion.

Does anyone even know of apps that read and use these meta[@name]
elements? I think that their presence is good news for RDFa for several
reasons:

- even if no one is using the metadata, it's considered good practice to
put it there

- these elements are obviously being generated by software that would only
need minor reconfiguration to generate RDFa instead

a simple stylesheet can treat those meta[@name] elements as
meta[@property] elements now

Any thoughts?

thanks,

Bob DuCharme

Received on Monday, 12 February 2007 04:30:38 UTC