Re: Embedded (inline) indexing tags

At Fri, Dec 31, 2004 at 06:00:20AM +0000, Thomas Hedden wrote:
> I have always thought that there should
> be some way of tagging words, phrases,
> sentences, graphics (actually anything)
> with an indexing tag that can be used to
> generate a proper index. This is distinct
> from META data, since META data is in the
> header, and can only be used to find WEB
> PAGES, not individual parts of web pages,

That view isn't particularly modern in light of the XHTML2 drafts.

Under XHTML2, you can add metadata to any element you want.  In fact, I imagine
that the vast majority of metadata which would have been put in the header would
find itself better placed elsewhere.

  Instead of:
    <meta name="dc:title" content="My site"/>
  You could have:
    <h1 property="dc:title">My site</h1>

  Instead of:
    <meta name="dc:copyright" content="Copyright 2005 ABC Corporation"/>
  You could have:
    <div property="dc:copyright">Copyright 2005 ABC Corporation</div>

The instant advantage you get is that you remove the redundant information.

Using the same attributes, you don't need to refer to an entire page, either.

  <h3 id="aa" about="#aa" property="dc:description" content="This section...">
    ...
  </h3>

Of course, the case you list with multiple properties defined on a single element
still can't be done with attributes alone.  Still, this does give you a lot of what
you thought was missing.  You can obviously tag keywords in this fashion too, just
by spanning single words throughout the text.  Generating a list of keywords, then,
becomes a trivial matter of matching all tags with the keyword property.

TX

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