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

(Actual content relevant to www-html is halfway down this email. :) )

The following text was discovered Sunday 25 August 2002 in a note
attributed to one "Gabriele Fava <gabriele.fava@tiscalinet.it>":

> I've seen your site. I don't think you'll be offended if I tell you that 
> you're the maddest css coder that I've ever seen %-)

Thanks! *beams* :)

> Anyway I didn't mean to say that :after and :before should absolutely in 
> any case not be used. Actually I ill expressed myself; speaking of "page 
> contents" I meant the meaningful content. Clearly your "pseudo-tags" are 
> not meaningful content, and it's just as well that you use style sheets, 
> so that one can disable them; it is not so good in accessibility, 
> because before one using a screen reader can notice that it's just a css 
> trick it would probably leave the page, but I guess you did not intend 
> to put accessibility on the first place when you wrote that pages.

I kind of figured that most screen readers wouldn't even notice, since
screen readers would either:
1) not support CSS, or
2) not support visual-only CSS. (The media type for all my stylesheets is
"screen" rather than, say, "aural" or "braille". I wouldn't even know where
to start with styling for those, so I just make sure my HTML is structurally
reasonable and hope that they've got an effective browser. :) )

But this is an aside discussion, and I'm posting to www-html as well, so
let's move on.

> Lorenzo's proposals are very different from what you devised in your 
> site. Using style sheets to accomplish them you would modify the 
> document structure and meaningful content.

(And here's the justification for this reaching www-html...)

The goal that I'm seeing is to try to avoid duplication of information that
shows up in both <meta> elements and would also show up in, say, page
footers. Things like the document title (sometimes), the author of the page,
copyright date, et cetera et cetera.

Using CSS is one way (and one that I was wishing for a while back), but
that's probably ultimately just a poor hack. RDF might provide another way,
but I wouldn't know; I don't know a thing about RDF beyond "it does
metadata". :)  Ultimately, though, the idea is to reduce that duplication of
information, which (IMO) is a Good Thing.

(Theoretically, it'd be pretty darn nice if UAs would actually make that
metainformation visible one way or another; say, though a page "properties"
dialog, et cetera. But this is unreliable, as it depends on each individual
UA, and we all know how reliable web browser authors are. :) )


-- 
Joanne Hunter <http://menagerie.tf/~jrhunter/>  Say No to HTML Mail!/"\
 Of course, I don't know how interesting any of this really is,     \ /
 but now you've got it in your brain cells so you're stuck with it.  X
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Received on Sunday, 25 August 2002 17:19:03 UTC