licentious radio
Sunday, April 28, 2002[11:08:29 PM]
Google has a problem: which part of the page is "content" and which parts are "page junk" -- advertising, navigation, branding, etc.? It's easy to guess right most of the time, but it's hard to get it right all of the time.
Just add a tag: <content> ... </content>. Let the page creators mark the content part.
The W3C hasn't given us the tag. A lot of people use <div class=content>, but we can do better.
XML namespaces let you make up your own dtd, and embed tags from your dtd in another document. Example:
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/HTML/1998/html4"
xmlns:gc="http://www.google.com/dtd/content">
<gc:content> ... </gc:content>
And the whole DTD would just be something like:
<!ELEMENT content>
That's all it would take, technically. Socially, figure that all web professionals and enthusiasts would follow Google's lead.
© Copyright 2002 john robert boynton.
Last update: 9/27/02; 11:03:35 PM.