[xhtml2] meta and search engines

Hi,
This is a QA Review comment for "XHTML 2.0"
http://www.w3.org/TR/2006/WD-xhtml2-20060726/
2006-07-26
8th WD

About http://www.w3.org/TR/2006/WD-xhtml2-20060726/mod-meta.html#sec_23.2.1.

Specification XHTML 2.0 says:

 "23.2.1. meta and search engines

 A common use for meta is to specify keywords 
 that a search engine may use to improve the 
 quality of search results."
 
It is clearly a section that will attract negative comments. Because of keywords spam in the past, many *public* search engines have stopped to index keywords. It is true that these keywords may be useful in the context of a company, a CMS, etc. The specification should be more specific and gives practical examples and team up with search engines developers to verify in which cases they are used. For example, Spotlight on Mac OS X do index the description and the keywords. 
Rephrase it to make it clearer and show the understanding of the issues and in which contexts it will give benefits.
As said in a previous mail, there will be even more benefit, if the meta is defined in-situ in the content and not in the head.




-- 
Karl Dubost - http://www.w3.org/People/karl/
W3C Conformance Manager, QA Activity Lead
   QA Weblog - http://www.w3.org/QA/
      *** Be Strict To Be Cool ***

Received on Thursday, 17 August 2006 03:28:56 UTC