- From: Shelley Powers <shelley.just@gmail.com>
- Date: Thu, 22 Apr 2010 12:20:38 -0500
- To: HTMLWG WG <public-html@w3.org>
I'm reading the minutes from the Accessibility TF teleconference today, and see the following[1]: "we are facing an endemic fear of invisible meta-data and meta-data in general" "one of the main objection it is hidden, so will probably be incorrect or out of date" "hidden meta data is bad, details has hidden data by default" This also follows on from the discussion of attributes being "bad" because they're bolted on, which underlies the supposed 'inferiority' of ARIA as compared to built-in elements. I don't know where these ideas originated, but meta data and "hidden" page data has been around for over a decade, and has successfully been integrated into most web pages. There is meta data that covers how the document is to be served, the character set, microformats for calendar information, RDFa for covering broader semantic interests, and a host of other uses. As for business use: this week Facebook, the most popular web site in the world today, began an effort to integrate "hidden" meta data, using "bolted-on" functionality. This follows from a Drupalcon keynote address primarily focused on the new integration of RDFa into the next release of Drupal7, a CMS that accounts for 1% of the web pages today. That 1% may not seem like much, but think of the exponential growth of the product. As it is, Wordpress, which accounts for 9% of the web sites today, also makes use of hidden meta data and "bolted on" attributes. And that's just two tools -- many other tools also use meta data and bolted on attributes in various forms. Are these hidden meta data and bolted on attributes useful? Not long ago, Best Buy reported that the use of such hidden meta data and bolted on attributed increased traffic to the company's web site by 30% [2]. I do not know where the assumption came from that bolted on values, which encompass both RDFa and Microformats, and "hidden" meta data is bad, but there is nothing to back any of this up, and I for one will be challenging whenever I see it raised from this point on. Shelley [1] http://www.w3.org/2009/12/17-html-a11y-minutes.html [2] http://priyankmohan.blogspot.com/2009/12/online-retail-how-best-buy-is-using.html
Received on Thursday, 22 April 2010 17:21:11 UTC