|Do you mean to imply that META elements would only appear in the header? I
|expect to use this type of tagging in the body as well, though I would will
|only expect HEAD to return the ones in the header (along with the rest of
|the header, of course).
|
|For example, I can envision tagging the following sentence in the body of a
|news article:
|
|<meta person="Gates, William">Bill Gates, chairman of <meta
|company="Microsoft" ticker="MSFT" SIC="1234567"> Microsoft Corp. announced
|today that blah, blah, blah.
This is a very important issue, and fortunately it is covered in HTML
3.0 (formerly HTML+), though not with the META element.
You can define, not attributes, but complete elements. And, more
importantly, in such a way that any SGML tool can understand
them. There are two types of elements you can add: (1) paragraph-level
elements and (2) character-level elements. Your examples would be
character-level elements, since they tag characters in a text, without
causing a paragraph break.
Your example would translate to:
* at the top of the document, declare the new tags:
<!doctype htmlplus system [
<!element person - - (%text)+>
<!attlist person
name CDATA #IMPLIED>
<!element company - - (%text)+>
<!attlist company
name CDATA #IMPLIED
ticker CDATA #IMPLIED
sic CDATA #IMPLIED>
<!entity % cextra "person|company" -- here's the trick! -->
<!entity % pextra "" -- no new para elements -->
]>
* in the body, use them:
<person name="Gates, William">Bill Gates</person>, chairman of
<company name="Microsoft" ticker="MSFT" SIC="1234567">
Microsoft Corp.</company> announced today that blah, blah, blah.
(You can even specify a particular lay-out for them, such as bold,
italics, all within HTML 3.0. But in this example you probably want
the tags to remain invisible to the reader.)
Bert
--
__________________________________
/ _ Bert Bos <bert@let.rug.nl> |
() |/ \ Alfa-informatica, |
\ |\_/ Rijksuniversiteit Groningen |
\_____/| Postbus 716 |
| 9700 AS GRONINGEN |
| Nederland |
| http://tyr.let.rug.nl/~bert/ |
\__________________________________|