Re: The Title header
David W. Morris (dwm@shell.portal.com)
Fri, 19 Jul 1996 12:20:22 -0700 (PDT)
On Fri, 19 Jul 1996, John Franks wrote:
> In fact, I would find an argument to make it mandatory persuasive.
I wouldn't be happy about any change to http which made analysis of the
content of a file mandatory. We should not demand that servers
analyze HTML.
And in current practice, my experience as the designer of a search
tool is that titles are used to provide meaningful captions on browser
screens not sumarize the document content which would be useful for
search engines.
I haven't looked at the mime spec so it may already agree with me ... but
if HTTP were to include a header relating to title or document content
it should be clearly a document description which might be provided by
a server and might (NOT mandatory) be provided by content analysis or
meta data stored by the server external to the document. It should not
be directly specified as being a particular element of a particular
content type.
Dave Morris