NYCPHP Meetup

[csnyder]

Just to add some fuel to this fire:

<META> tags are toooo 90s, but if the client likes to see them in the
code they aren't going to hurt anything (subject to John Andrew's
observations, of course). They will only ever be used by internal
search engines, because no one else is gonna be looking for them.

The most robust and extensible way to do the same thing is to use
embedded RDF with Dublin Core extensions, which is what Sir TBL was
pimping in that 2001 article that Peter sent. At least if external
search engines are looking for Creative Commons or Friend-of-a-Friend
metadata, they will find and parse your RDF.

Like many great solutions, RDF will probably never catch on because
people just can't bear to think in tuples. Hence the Web 2.0 style,
which is preferred by the in-crowd right now:

<link rel="robots" href="/robots.txt" />
<link rel="category" href="/path/to/category.html" />
<link rel="author" href="/path/to/author.html" />
... etc.

Until one or more of the major search engines puts up a sign saying
"Semantic Web Now Open" with a list of names/relations to use on your
content, it's all a bit of a crapshoot. If you have some internal
reason to put metadata on your pages, then decide on a namespace and
go for it. Otherwise, I'm not sure why you'd bother.