Re: hidden meta data and bolt on attributes

On Thu, Apr 22, 2010 at 2:35 PM, Leonard Rosenthol <lrosenth@adobe.com> wrote:
> And Shelley - you're only pointing about the metadata in the main page, but there is also the case that each image in the document contains metadata (most likely based on RDF/XMP as defined by the MWG).   Metadata is a wonderful thing and we should embracing it, not fearing it!
>

I agree Leonard, and thank you for the additional item.

I'm frankly excited about so many new initiatives and interest in meta
data. After all these years, the work with meta data is now paying
off.

> Leonard
>

Shelley

> -----Original Message-----
> From: public-html-request@w3.org [mailto:public-html-request@w3.org] On Behalf Of Shelley Powers
> Sent: Thursday, April 22, 2010 1:21 PM
> To: HTMLWG WG
> Subject: hidden meta data and bolt on attributes
>
> 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 or out of date"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 19:40:46 UTC