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Re: Metadata

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From: Jukka K. Korpela
Date: Aug 7, 2007 5:10AM

On Tue, 7 Aug 2007, Paul Collins wrote:

> I haven't had to do the Metadata side of things for a while and it's
> time to bring myself up to scratch...

Metadata for web pages is mostly irrelevant, both as regards to
accessibility and in other ways. Some technical metadata like the
document's character encoding is very essential of course, but usually not
considered as metadata in discussions like this.

> I wanted to first ask if someone could point me in the direction of a
> resource that explains how to create good accessible Metadata. I am
> guessing accessibility and SEO would go hand in hand with the correct
> metadata, but a resource that speaks about both would be great.

"Search Engine Optimization" (which is probably what you mean by "SEO") is
primarily an expression for attempts at making money with technobabble.
There is of course a lot we can do to help people to find our pages using
search engines when they answer their questions, and there are good
treatises on this, but they usually use different phrases (like "being
search-engine friendly"). And they have little to do with metadata, except
the <title> element (which is metadata, though not often regarded as
that).

The connection with search engine friendlyness and accessibility is mostly
practical. To be search engine friendly, you need to be processable by
software that basically analyzes your textual content only, in the order
of its appearance in HTML source, and pays attention to some structural
markup at most (generally ignoring all markup related to fonts, colors,
etc.) and linearizes your tables. This tends to produce better
accessibility, too.

> Which leads me to my next question; does anybody on here use Dublin
> Core metadata? I did last time I had to add metadata, but looking
> around at other reputable sites, it doesn't seem like anyone else
> does. Is Dublin Core not worth adding? Does Dublin core improve SEO,
> or do you need to add seperate metadata for this?

Dublin Core is used to some extent by some public sites, often with
incorrect metadata (I've seen e.g. European Union webpages with Dublin
Core metadata that claims that the document language is English, quite
independently of the language actually used. I guess it's not difficult to
figure out how such madness emerges.) But not much. There is no evidence
of any general-purpose search engine, or any other software commonly used
in the web context, actually paying the least attention to Dublin Core
metadata. In a word, writing Dublin Core metadata for web pages is still
an exercise in futility.

--
Jukka "Yucca" Korpela, http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/