Re: Meta info tags (was Re: what finger tags?)

Nick Arnett (narnett@verity.com)
Sun, 18 Sep 1994 19:01:44 -0800


At 8:07 AM 9/15/94 -0500, Daniel LaLiberte wrote:

>However the indexable attributes are tagged in HTML documents, I
>believe it is important that there should be some way to closely
>associate index entries with the text they are about. In other words,
>the index entries should be immediately next to (before or after) the
>paragraph or list item.

Not to disagree, I think we're just mixing issues here because of my sloppy
wording. The attributes I'm talking about for the HTML header are
*document* attributes. To the extent that an index entry is a document
attribute, I think it belongs in the header, so that a browser (robot or
human) doesn't have to scan the whole document to decide if it might be
relevant or not.

There's a fundamental problem in indexing (even more so in building key
words) -- the relevant terms to have indexed change over time. For
example, I'm sure that a lot of news organizations are wishing that there
were sophisticated tags to every reference to Haiti in their archives.

>Are meta tags only allowed in the HEAD of a document? If so, I dont
>believe they are sufficient for indexing. Probably some filter should
>be used to extract the embedded index tags to store them separately.

Maybe it's just begging the definition of "meta," but that's pretty much
what I see as belonging in the HTML header. (I'm saying HTML to be sure to
differentiate it from the HTTP header.)

>While I am suspicious of any scheme involving manual replicatiion,
>automatic replication (caching) will be required for scalability.
>Caching indexes is the easy part, but caching of services such as
>searching services is trickier.

I didn't mean to imply either manual or automatic replication. Each has
relevant uses.

Nick