Inspired Muck

• Posted: Oct 20th 2004, 02:15

I have been thinking, for a while now, about meta information in web pages and in other data mediums. I’m not just thinking about the meta element within the head section within an (X)HTML document but more along the lines of information which the user may not always see but is there regardless.

I think this could be easier to visualise if I gave some examples:

Blockquotes and the cite attribute

When creating a blockquote section within an (X)HTML document you can add information about the location, or source, of the quote itself: <blockquote cite="http://someuri/dev/null/" title="Some thing i am quoting">…

Acronyms/abbreviations and their titles

Whilst coding a document, you may wish to add abbreviations and allow your visitors to see the actual meaning. By placing the acronym within: <acronym title="full spelling of the acronym">the-acronym</acronym> you can allow the information to be implied whilst not jeopardising the readability of the document for potential readers.

Label descriptions

My esteemed colleague Rich Farmer has just implemented a method in which the title of a label is displayed. A label is used in a form to describe an input element’s function.

There are other examples, of course, but I wish to ponder the display of this meta information and the effect it can have upon the flow of the document and the way in which it is written. In a recent post I have written (quoted as plain text), Glyph Phragment (or GlyPh for short). I coded the word GlyPh as an acronym. Afterwards, upon reflection, I decided that it was a wasted statement. This is where the comparison for writing content, or articles, for the WWW is different to writing for printed mediums. There are so many methods for holding information about more information that I think it should be considered.

I am interested in the direction which UAs will take at the coming of XHTML 2. I know that a great deal of metadata has been re-evaluated. Ideas such as a table’s summary attribute have been considered; I know that is in progress towards becoming a child element of the table element itself. But now, in the present, I am interested in what these UAs are doing towards things like cite attributes within the q and blockquote elements. I currently cite a source document with a short sentence after a blockquote which links to the document itself (<p>Source: <a href="some-uri" title="some-title">some-title</a>.</p>). What would be preferable is that the UA allowed some form of click-to-view-the-source-of-the-quote action. That way, I could display the source URI, and the title without having to waste the use of the metadata implied in the element.

I also want to mention that in an effort to present more readable articles, my website style should now present an acronym title before displaying the acronym in parentheses. Is the experiment taking metadata to the extreme? Or am I assisting the user?