Re: [Lynx-dev] META NAMEs

[David Woolley]

> 
> I seek a list of often used META NAMEs (and HTTP-EQUIVs). I looked at
> <w3.org>, but got only that that depends on the profile mentioned in the
> HEAD, and profile I never hav seen, I hav seen AUTHOR, CREATED, MODIFIED,
> KEYWORDS, DESCRIPTION, GENERATOR, COPYRIGHT, ROBOTS.

Welcome to the wonderful world of proprietary de facto standards!  My
guess is that if you look at the meta data attributes from native MS-Word
documents, you will get a good indication of the likely meta keywords
in Microsoft generated HTML.

ROBOTS comes from the Robots Exclusion document.

> 
> Where is there a good list? or a common profile?

I think industry has ignored profiles; most are either write only or
intended for reconversion by the tool that created them in the first
place, so GENERATOR becomes the de facto profile name.

Note HTTP-EQUIVs ought to match the header names in the HTTP specification,
although, in practice, there are others, in particular REFRESH, which are
de facto standard extensions to HTTP (yes this really does work as 
a real HTTP header).

The real travesty is meta elements that contain links.  My feeling is
that many meta elements are better represented by link elements anyway,
and much of meta exists to dump out meta data from alternative file
formats, without attempting to hyplink appropriately.