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Specification: http://dev.w3.org/html5/spec/Overview.html Multipage: http://www.whatwg.org/C#top Complete: http://www.whatwg.org/c#top Comment: Hi, Section: Other metadata names We're using meta-tags on a public XHTML 1.1-compliant governmental site to expose site-specific meta-information per page to a search-engine crawler that we're using (a commercial product). We're in the process of moving to HTML5, and these meta-tags causes the site to not validate, even though everything else is pure, simple and semantic. I therefore propose that meta-tag names that are not in the wiki[1] are flagged as warnings instead of errors by conformance checkers, since the current spec probably will slow down the speed of HTML5 adoption for a lot of sites, and it also seems "wrong" to limit the generic usefulness of the meta-tag and also break compatibility with HTML 4.01 for no good reason. best regards Eirik Mikkelsen eim@brreg.no [1] http://wiki.whatwg.org/wiki/MetaExtensions Posted from: 95.169.47.131 User agent: Opera/9.80 (Windows NT 6.1; U; en) Presto/2.9.168 Version/11.50
Eirik, * Which site (if it's possible to know) * Which meta-tags are used? * Which commercial products used? The last two questions are important because concrete implementations are useful to understand in which ways the markup is used.
(In reply to comment #1) > Eirik, > > * Which site (if it's possible to know) > * Which meta-tags are used? > * Which commercial products used? > > The last two questions are important because concrete implementations are > useful to understand in which ways the markup is used. MondoSearch [1] is the product. Some of the meta-tags are related to page rank, such as "RANK-DOCUMENT" and "RATING". I don't have a complete list of all the meta-tags being used by this product, and I'm really not very familiar with it, but it seems like it also supports custom meta-tags specific for each site. From their brochure [2] ----------------------- "Users can limit searches to deliver results solely from specific categories. Categories can be easily created in several ways - using meta-tags or manual assignments." "Using custom ranking meta-tags, you can push pages up or down in the search result list." ----------------------- But this is just one of many ways that meta-tags have been used over the years on various sites, especially on intranet sites but also on the Internet. I don't see custom (meta)data attributes [3] needing such a whitelist ;) I know data attributes are intended for private use, but meta-tags can also be added for private use, and they *are* the current mechanism for specifying page level metadata. Karl, do you know the reason for wanting to add such a limitation in HTML5? I've been trying to find a discussion, but without any luck. Too me it seems like this important breaking of backwards-compatibility has gone "under the radar" when creating the HTML5 spec. [1] http://www.surfray.com/products/mondosearch-site-search.html [2] http://www.surfray.com/images/stories/files/mondosearch%205.4%20feature%20brochure.pdf [3] http://dev.w3.org/html5/spec/Overview.html#custom-data-attribute
(In reply to comment #1) > Eirik, > > * Which site (if it's possible to know) > * Which meta-tags are used? > * Which commercial products used? > > The last two questions are important because concrete implementations are > useful to understand in which ways the markup is used. It also seems like Google Search Appliance supports metadata biasing based on arbitrary meta tags: http://code.google.com/apis/searchappliance/documentation/52/help_gsa/serve_scoring_edit.html#metadata_biasing "2. For each metadata tag you want to affect, enter a metadata name and metadata content."
EDITOR'S RESPONSE: This is an Editor's Response to your comment. If you are satisfied with this response, please change the state of this bug to CLOSED. If you have additional information and would like the editor to reconsider, please reopen this bug. If you would like to escalate the issue to the full HTML Working Group, please add the TrackerRequest keyword to this bug, and suggest title and text for the tracker issue; or you may create a tracker issue yourself, if you are able to do so. For more details, see this document: http://dev.w3.org/html5/decision-policy/decision-policy.html Status: Rejected Change Description: no spec change Rationale: Given how easy it is to register metadata names, I don't think that this is a big problem. Also, we don't seem to be having any trouble getting adoption. On the contrary, if anything, people are adopting HTML5 so quickly that we're getting adoption of some parts of the spec before we're ready! (The pushState() saga comes to mind!)