This is an archived snapshot of W3C's public bugzilla bug tracker, decommissioned in April 2019. Please see the home page for more details.

Bug 17922 - 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: WHATWG
Classification: Unclassified
Component: HTML (show other bugs)
Version: unspecified
Hardware: Other other
: P3 normal
Target Milestone: Unsorted
Assignee: Ian 'Hixie' Hickson
QA Contact: contributor
URL: http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/...
Whiteboard:
Keywords:
Depends on:
Blocks:
 
Reported: 2012-07-18 07:17 UTC by contributor
Modified: 2012-09-05 23:16 UTC (History)
3 users (show)

See Also:


Attachments

Description contributor 2012-07-18 07:17:31 UTC
This was was cloned from bug 16497 as part of operation convergence.
Originally filed: 2012-03-23 17:37:00 +0000

================================================================================
 #0   contributor@whatwg.org                          2012-03-23 17:37:40 +0000 
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
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
================================================================================
 #1   theimp@iinet.net.au                             2012-07-05 02:50:36 +0000 
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
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 1 Ian 'Hixie' Hickson 2012-09-05 23:16:09 UTC
Is this a request from a search engine manufacturer? (People who don't work for search engines tend to have a very different idea of what would be helpful for search engines than those who don't, which is why I ask.)