[whatwg] Where did the "rev" attribute go?

Henri Sivonen wrote:
> And then what? Why is it useful that a computer knows that a string on 
> a Web page is a human name? 
Off the top of my head, a couple possible benefits of tagging proper names:

* smarter search engines
    (<name>Bill Gates</name> is not the words "bill" and "gates". Could 
be beneficial to newspaper sites.)
* speech synthesis
    (Surely there's a good reason CSS3 Speech has "interpret-as: name" 
and VoiceXML has interpret-as="name")
* spell checking
    (Usable by Web page editing software)

I expect the Semantic Web could work it into their 
encapsulation-of-knowledge schemes.

> Do the benefits of the computer having such knowledge outweigh the 
> cost of the human labor required to mark up names?
Good question. I expect many Web authors would not avail themselves of 
the option of using <name> even if it were available.

> (If you really needed to figure out on a computer which strings are 
> names, instead of requiring page authors to cooperate with you, you 
> could get results by extracting clusters of capitalized words, 
> matching them against a database of known first and last names and 
> filling in the gaps by guessing. For example, you could guess that 
> Krempeaux is a family name, because it is a capitalized word that 
> follows two well-known given names.)
That probably wouldn't work better in running text than on a page of 
capitalized titles or headlines like "Bush Administration Urges Congress 
to Ratify Detainee Treatment".

Received on Wednesday, 12 July 2006 07:57:08 UTC