Re: New requirement - Simplifying Meta Data Profile

Denis Boudreau wrote:
> Was there a reason in the first place as to go for different entries
> with the meta element, instead of thinking in terms of attribute for   a
> single meta element? The fear of unreasonnably long values maybe?

>From the HTML 4 spec: [1]

| name = name [CS]
| This attribute identifies a property name. This specification does
| not list legal values for this attribute.
| content = cdata [CS]
| This attribute specifies a property's value. This specification does
| not list legal values for this attribute.

This is to give the author more flexibility about what sort of information
he or she wants to share about the document.  There is no standard set of
values that can appear in those fields.  Ultimately, the values Sajid
mentioned are arbitrary.  There could also be:

<meta name="author-gender" content="male">

There is no reason to add <meta author-gender="male"> to the specification
because some (possibly large) group of people decided to use it.  The meta
tags mentioned aren't required, and aren't standardized.  AFAIK,
attributes must be defined.  So, I would shoot for trying to rationalize a
reason to standardize the attributes existence before I'd attempt to join
them into one element.

[1] http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/struct/global.html#h-7.4.4.2

Received on Wednesday, 14 March 2007 22:17:19 UTC