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Posted by Jukka K. Korpela on 10/02/06 07:48
Scripsit G Doucet:
> I wanted to keep track of my html files with a version number
Do you need to put the information in the files themselves? Maybe. Hardcore
version control is tough, and often overkill.
> and identify myself as being the author.
Well, then put your real name there, at the bottom. Preferably so that it is
a link to your personal home page, to help to avoid confusion with other
people with the same full name.
Even the version number might work best when written in the document content
itself. For example, at the bottom, you could have <div>This is version 2 of
the page, created April 1, 2006.</div>
> I could place this information
> in a comment at the top of the html document, like: <!-- Author =
> G Doucet --> <!-- Version = 2 -->
Comments considered harmful. HTML is not a programming language. Generally,
if markup "needs" a comment, it needs a rewrite. There are a few exceptions,
but consider them as rarities to be avoided.
> While I'm at it, is a comment supposed to be like <!-- comment --> or
> <!-- comment //--> ???
The former, of course. (To be very technical, the _comment_ is --
comment --, but you need to precede it with <! and to write > after it.)
> Now I'm not very familiar with the meta tag but I have noticed that
> you could do something like this too: <META name="Author"
> content="G Doucet">
You could, and e.g. Nvu generates it automagically, but I have not seen any
program make any _use_ of such information.
> What exactly does this achieve,
It basically has the role of a comment. It might be preferred to a comment,
because it's structured in a _way_. It _could_ be utilized programmatically.
> and who sees this META information?
Any software that processes your document, but it will most likely ignore
it.
It isn't based on any published _specification_ either. There is no
"standard" on it even in the loosest sense of the word.
Things are different in principle if you use some published metadata
specification, such as Dublin Core. Then there's something that specifies
the format and meaning and could be used consistently. Well, more or less.
Dublin Core, for one, is actually rather vague in many ways. Dublin Core is
hardly used by any www-wide software, though it _is_ used in many local
systems and _could_ be used e.g. by search engines as well. However, much of
the Dublin Core metadata on web pages is just crap - written by people who
had no clue, or copied from other documents without changing anything, or
generated by programs from some unreliable data. So I'm not really expecting
Google and others to start paying much attention to such metadata.
Anyway, _if_ you decide to use Dublin Core, which at least gives you a
fairly systematic metadata approach with _some_ specifications, you could
use the following <head> tag to declare that:
<head profile="http://dublincore.org/documents/dcq-html/">
and the following to specify author information:
<meta name="DC.creator" content="G Doucet">
> Is there one for a version number?
Not in Dublin Core; most probably in some other metadata system(s), but they
have even less relevance on the Web.
If you wish to express a version number in metadata, then you could append
it into DC.title. It wouldn't be any _structured_ part there; the DC.title
value is just a string, effectively the DC counterpart of the <title>
element content, though it could have a more detailed message, e.g.
<title>Gruntmaster 9001 product specification</title>
- -
<meta name="DC.title" value=
"Gruntmaster 9001 product specification, version 2">
--
Jukka K. Korpela ("Yucca")
http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/
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