Re: Meta - Resource-type tagging

On Wed, 25 Sep 1996, Chad Zimmerman wrote:
> 
> I was just asked a question on what other types of Resource-type's there 
> can be within the meta tag.  Currently, I only know of <meta 
> name="resource-type" content="document">, I have heard that others are 
> being sugested.  Does anyone know if there are other defined resource types
> for meta now?

Well a whole bunch of people have been working on squeezing Dublin Core 
metadata in to HTML 2.0 META elements to allow it to be used as a lowest 
common denominator metadata for embedding in web pages.  Dublin Core 
contains a whole load of information about resource types (including the 
genre of a work).  The current favoured approach is to use:

<META NAME="DC.ElementName" 
CONTENT="(SubElement1=SubElementValue1)(SubElement2=SubElementValue2) Value">

For example:

<META NAME="DC.author" CONTENT="(type=name) Jon Knight">
<META NAME="DC.title" CONTENT=" My New Ode">
<META NAME="DC.objecttype" CONTENT="(scheme=DCObjects) Poem">
<META NAME="DC.identifier" CONTENT="(scheme=URL) http://www.me.com/">

This is, as far as any of us are aware, valid HTML 2.0 (and 3.0 and 3.2),
which is important (at least to anal people like me who want their code to
both validate and contain metadata).  This format is based on the more
general: 

<META NAME="schema_identifier.element_name" CONTENT="string_data">

which was a convention proposed at the W3C Distributed Indexing and 
Searching Workshop, May 28-29, 1996 (see 
<URL:http://www.oclc.org:5046/~weibel/html-meta.html> for more details).  
The advantage of following this convention is that it allows new schemas 
to be easily added with getting them confused with META elements refering 
to existing

There's a draft list of sub-element names and values being worked on at
<URL:http://www.roads.lut.ac.uk/Metadata/DC-SubElements.html> and Paul
Miller wrote an article for Ariadne entitled "Metadata for the masses"
that talks about the use of Dublin Core metadata (see
<URL:http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/ariadne/issue5/metadata-masses/>). 

Tatty bye,

Jim'll

-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Jon "Jim'll" Knight, Researcher, Sysop and General Dogsbody, Dept. Computer
Studies, Loughborough University of Technology, Leics., ENGLAND.  LE11 3TU.
* I've found I now dream in Perl.  More worryingly, I enjoy those dreams. *

Received on Wednesday, 25 September 1996 11:57:31 UTC