Future of HTML
http://www.cse.psu.edu/~song/paper/future.html
Name:    Zhengrong Song
Proposer contact:    song@cse.psu.edu
campuse phone:  814-867-6295  home phone:703-904-6921
home address: 13304 Rowles Place, Herndon, VA 20170

Improvement suggestion

1.<MIRROR> tag

The addition of META tags such as for robots and keywords initiated improvement of HTML from document management perspective, but there are lot to be done in this area.

I would like to propose a new mark up tag as extension to HTML 4.0:

Suggest Syntax:
<MIRROR href="www2.cse.psu.edu">PSU CSE alternative</MORROR>

Advantage:
Mirror sites can be extremely valueble for search engine to return to users as alternatives to orginal sites.
<MIRROR> tag dedicated to hyperlinks that specfically for the sites that mirror the original site, this will enable seach engine effectively detect and define the set of mirrors and therefore can provide user multiple access alternatives in the search result listing, thus user will be empowered  to get the information fast and ideally as 'local' as possible and being able to access alternatives when some server are unavailable.
 

compare to the HTML 4.0 spec of LINKs tags, we can adapt it in the following format to achieve the above <MIRROR> tag functionality:
<LINK    rel="MIRROR"   origin="http://www.cse.psu.edu"     href="http://www2.cse.psu.edu">PSU-CSE alternative site in Europe</A>

'origin' can field can have the default value of current page when not supplied.
 

2.    site building:    'submit.html' page

similar to the convention of index.html(home.html/default.html) , 'submit.html' would be the webmaster's choice to imform the robot to index those files listed in submit.html first when it visit the site.

Submit.html which could include the most important and representatinve files on the site might provide a better guidance for robots to follow and traverse those first and should have higher weights in the ranking process. For instance, for the PSU-CSE departmental server, we might want to list the few pages that contains our degree program, course listing and faculty research list within the submit.html.
 
 

**The above suggestion had been formally submitted to 'www-html@w3.org' mailing list as
'Future of HTML' position paper for upcoming "Shaping the Future of HTML" workshop as of 3/6/98.