Re: a new value for <title> and other meta tags

on 22-08-2002 11:17, Chris Mannall at chris.mannall@hecubagames.com wrote:

> This also has a number of disadvantages, however.
> 
> Firstly, as other people have mentioned, more often than not the title
> and the page heading will have different content, since the title must
> make sense out-of-context whereas the page heading is by definition
> always in the context of the page.

Then you put the <title> back in <head> and use an <h> like normal.

> Secondly, it's fair to say that if you look at the web as a whole, the
> h1 element is far from always a direct child of the body element. For
> whatever reason, it's often a child of a div or (bleagh) table element.
> This causes problems in terms of validation; if you have to allow the
> potential use of the title element as a child of many different
> elements, there's no way to enforce that you can only have one title
> element in the document.

Yes, the title element must be only one, such as copyright, author,
description, etc. (look at my past mail)

> Next, there's the fact that the title element would have to be given a
> content model beyond plain text. I see a lot of pages with headings in a
> form like <h1><span>Important Word</span> minor word <span>Important
> Word</span></h1>, for reasons of styling... in order to allow this, the
> title element would have to be given a content model that allowed child
> elements.

Yes, we can think about them.

> Frankly, by this stage this is already beginning to sound pretty messy.
> The use cases are pretty narrow (since the majority of documents have
> differing titles and headings), and provide very few benefits (modern
> bandwidth makes saving twenty/thirty bytes pretty inconsequential, and
> keeping the title and heading in sync is hardly difficult).

It can useful for books, chapters, articles and especially for GPL and
OpenDoc Documents. You can write them only one time and obtain both xhtml
and pdf versions. Obviously the advantages for <title> are little, but think
about <copyright> and <description> (where you can add paragraphs, links,
e-mail addresses, etc.), <version>, etc. Text can be very long.

> For what it's worth, it would be fairly easy to achieve this with CSS if
> you could convince the CSS working group of its practical use. For
> example, CSS already defines the :before pseudo-element and the content
> property, which could potentially be used in this manner:
> 
> <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
> <head>
> <title id="documentTitle">the title of my document</title>
> <style type="text/css">/*<![CDATA[*/
> body:before { content:#documentTitle; }
> /*]]>*/</style>
> </head>
> <body>
> <p>My text</p>
> </body>
> </html>

yes, but it's difficult for common people. I think that my solution is much
easier... We must define some useful and frequent tag that can substitute
<meta> inline. For example I think that can be useful to create: abstract,
author, copyright, data, description, generator... maybe organization. They
can work as the address element in the text module.
what do you think?

Received on Thursday, 22 August 2002 07:13:55 UTC