xml-dev - Re: Megginson and XMLNews

[Walter Underwood <wunder@infoseek.com>]

At 06:23 PM 4/10/99 -0400, David Megginson wrote:
>Chris Lilley writes:
>
> > Walter Underwood wrote:
> > 
> > > Why <lang> instead of an xml:lang attribute?
>
>(And many other very good questions.)  I will look into the mismatch
>in the ISO 8601 profile; otherwise, however, XMLNews-Story is designed
>to be subset-compatible with the XML version of NITF.

The W3C Note is here:  http://www.w3.org/TR/NOTE-datetime

>Many people -- mostly leading technical specialists in the news
>industry -- have put a lot of careful work into NITF (née UTF) over
>coming on a decade now, and we didn't see any good reason to split the
>market by introducing a competing format; ...

Understandable. As I said about RDF a couple of days back, two
formats are almost never better than one.

As a search engine writer, my interest is in common conventions
across different formats. So far, I've only found one thing that
is common to almost every DTD -- the first <title> tag is the
title (the major exception is the NAA "adex" DTD for classifieds,
where <ad-slug> is the closest thing to a title).

HTML has some conventions for search-engine metadata (title, 
description, keywords, robots). With XML, the administrator
needs to map each DTD to these elements -- more work, more
chance for error. And if the data is not there, not in a parsable
format, or in a separate metadata file, the search engine is
handicapped.

I expect to ship our next release pre-configured for NITF,
but I sure would like to see some common practice beyond <title>.
Mostly, our customers would appreciate it, and the people doing
searches would get better results.

wunder 

--
Walter R. Underwood
wunder@infoseek.com
wunder@best.com (home)
http://software.infoseek.com/cce/ (my product)
http://www.best.com/~wunder/
1-408-543-6946

xml-dev: A list for W3C XML Developers. To post, mailto:xml-dev@ic.ac.uk
Archived as: http://www.lists.ic.ac.uk/hypermail/xml-dev/ and on CD-ROM/ISBN 981-02-3594-1
To (un)subscribe, mailto:majordomo@ic.ac.uk the following message;
(un)subscribe xml-dev
To subscribe to the digests, mailto:majordomo@ic.ac.uk the following message;
subscribe xml-dev-digest
List coordinator, Henry Rzepa (mailto:rzepa@ic.ac.uk)