DC-Based Concerns with <HEAD PROFILE="...">

Hello,

By and large HTML 4.0 represents some good steps forward considering
the political forces standing in the way of doing the right thing.

But at the Dublin Core meeting in Helsinki this week, my blissful
ignorance on HTML evolution, inspired by fear of an out-of-control
html-wg mailing list was forcibly shattered.

Its nice that we got SCHEME added to META, and for meta data de
jour this should be sufficient.  But as specified, the PROFILE attribute
mechanism is unable to allow reference to more than one metadata scheme in
a HEAD element.  Worse architecturally, it consumes the PROFILE semantics
that could be applied to other HEAD content once and only once for META.

It seems that something like:

<LINK REL=META_PROFILE NAME="DC" CONTENT="http://..."> might be a more 
flexible way to describe recommended practice than the PROFILE att for
HEAD.  This would say that all <META NAME="DC.*"...> would be described by
the value at the end of the CONTENT URL.

I understand the political constraints involved in building a
specification like this, but whilst the patient is on the table and open,
let's try to do it correctly.

Otherwise, this represents a lot of hard work and looks better than
anything that's come before.

-marc

Received on Monday, 13 October 1997 11:52:33 UTC