- From: Martin Hamilton <martin@mrrl.lut.ac.uk>
- Date: Sat, 10 Aug 1996 08:12:43 +0100
- To: http-wg%cuckoo.hpl.hp.com@hplb.hpl.hp.com
Peter J Churchyard writes: | When following discussions on content negociation and similiar issues, | I often reflect as to whether it would be a good idea to allow meta data | to be embedded in the anchor when a document is retrieved so that if a | link is to a docuemnt is several formats, the user could xxx-click on the | link and get a menu displayed of the available formats. Another approach (and since this is the HTTP list...) might be to have some way of saying *in HTTP* that what you want is the object's "metadata", or the metadata for a whole load of objects. This could be done perhaps even by a separate "META" method, or an extra header, and might be implemented as (for instance) an Apache module. By "metadata" I mean descriptive info which isn't the results of an HTTP HEAD request - it could be much more descriptive than that. It could also be hand generated, or extracted from the object - e.g. via Harvest's HTML summarizer, or embedded comments created by editors and conversion programs like LaTeX2HTML. Anyone who is interested in this sort of thing might want to check out the discussions we've been having on the "meta2" mailing list - see recent threads in the Hypermail archive at <URL:http://www.roads.lut.ac. uk/lists/meta2/>. You're welcome to join the list if you can figure out how to. This is my variation on Marshall Rose's great quip about setting entrance exams :-) Martin
Received on Saturday, 10 August 1996 00:15:05 UTC