Re: A question/suggestion for HTML 2.0 or 3.0
Michael Mealling (Michael.Mealling@oit.gatech.edu)
Thu, 17 Aug 1995 14:40:50 -0400 (EDT)
John Franks said this:
> In article <v0213050cac5928838c71@[192.88.238.59]>, J. Casey wrote:
> > At 15:59 17/8/95, Michael Mealling wrote:
> > >I'm sitting here hacking Mosaic code so that it can understand URCs and
> > >it occurs to me that a very powerful addition to the Anchor tag would
> > >be a META attribute that specifies meta-information that is not within
> > >the document itself.
>
> You might be interested in a little known and little used feature of the
> WN server which provides the functionality you want as a parameter
> to any URL it serves. Simply adding an "info" parameter to the end of any URL
> automatically provides a URL to meta information about the document.
>
> For example, try
>
> http://hopf.math.nwu.edu/index.html;info
>
> It might well be that "meta" would have been a better name than "info."
> This might also avoid some of the debate about whether it is an HREF
> itself. Something like this could be very useful if it were standardized
> and browsers supported it.
YES! I'm just not sure everyone could agree on that as URL extension. The
reasoning behind making it something other than an HREF is that
functionally its a different operation. An HREF points you to the resource.
This is different in that it points you to a surrogate for the resource
which implies a different set of operations.
> > But this has the problem that the author of a document has no control over
> > the meta information associated with the document. Having meta information
> > specified in
> > the HEAD as an associated LINK'ed resource would seem to be the correct
> > way to do this.
> >
>
> This is not of any use for non-HTML documents though. How would you
> provide meta information about a GIF file? On the other hand
>
> http://hopf.math.nwu.edu/logo.gif;info
>
> works fine.
Good point.
-MM
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<HR><A HREF="http://www.gatech.edu/michael.html">Michael Mealling</A>
