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Bug 16497 - HTML should provide a tag called <index> so that the authors of the web pages can enclose words and phrases that they think should be indexed. This would help search engines and others who would like to index web pages. Even the web authors could use a
Summary: HTML should provide a tag called <index> so that the authors of the web pages...
Status: RESOLVED NEEDSINFO
Alias: None
Product: HTML WG
Classification: Unclassified
Component: HTML5 spec (show other bugs)
Version: unspecified
Hardware: Other other
: P3 normal
Target Milestone: ---
Assignee: Edward O'Connor
QA Contact: HTML WG Bugzilla archive list
URL: http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/...
Whiteboard:
Keywords:
Depends on:
Blocks:
 
Reported: 2012-03-23 17:37 UTC by contributor
Modified: 2013-02-25 22:52 UTC (History)
7 users (show)

See Also:

Attachments

Description contributor 2012-03-23 17:37:40 UTC 
Specification: http://www.w3.org/TR/html5/
Multipage: http://www.whatwg.org/C#top
Complete: http://www.whatwg.org/c#top

Comment:
HTML should provide a tag called <index> so that the authors of the web pages
can enclose words and phrases that they think should be indexed.  This would
help search engines and others who would like to index web pages.  Even the
web authors could use a program that could auto generate an index page from
various web pages on a topic for web publication. 

Posted from: 24.63.58.162
User agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64) AppleWebKit/535.11 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/17.0.963.79 Safari/535.11
Comment 1 theimp 2012-07-05 02:50:36 UTC 
Unfortunately, as we have seen with the keywords meta attribute in the past, this is open to abuse, to such a degree, that it will be unimplemented.

However, perhaps you could use <mark>, and if search engines develop algorithms to determine levels of "trust" for documents, they could then optionally consider your use of <mark> to have an effect similar to your proposal for <index>.
Comment 2 contributor 2012-07-18 07:17:34 UTC 
This bug was cloned to create bug 17922 as part of operation convergence.
Comment 3 Robin Berjon 2013-01-21 15:59:19 UTC 
Mass move to "HTML WG"
Comment 4 Robin Berjon 2013-01-21 16:02:05 UTC 
Mass move to "HTML WG"
Comment 5 Edward O'Connor 2013-02-25 22:52:33 UTC 
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: Additional Information Needed
Change Description: No spec change.
Rationale: It's unclear how such a feature would help search engines.
That said, would you be interested in pursuing such a feature in an
extension specification?