Re: Meta data in anchors..

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