Header for archive notes

Webpages viewed from the cache of search engines are often messed up,
including some of my webpages. There should be a standard way to include
the kind of header that Google, Yahoo, etc. adds to the top of cached
pages without messing up the page. It's possible to programmatically
change the positioning and create a valid webpage with the desired header,
but that's sometimes difficult and search engines apparently don't do it.
An easy way to add a header would also help when saving a copy of a
webpage that you want to add comments to. It would be similar to PDF
pop-up notes.

The element that contains the header text could be <header> or
<body-head>. The header would need to remain visible at the top of the
document and not be effected by style sheets that the page's original
author created except maybe for a CSS class with a standard name that an
archiver can easily find and replace if necessary. Some inline styles
could be allowed too. The header must not effect the rest of the markup
except to lower it, or maybe to cover it if it's possible to minimize or
close the header.

Uninformed webmasters might put their own content in such an element in a
"live" webpage, and it might get replaced by a search engine for the
cached version, but that would be the webmaster's fault. The standard
could include instructions on what to do with a populated header element
when an archiver wants to add a different one, like maybe put it in a
"header-#" element where "#" is a number indicating the chronological
order of the header elements.

Received on Tuesday, 7 August 2007 11:36:43 UTC