On Thu, 2010-03-18 at 03:37 +0100, Roger Hågensen wrote: > I searched the list, and looked at the HTML5 briefly and found nothing, > nor can I ever recall such. > So this is both a question and a proposal. > > On my own site currently I mostly replicate the first paragraph of an > article in my journal as the meta description, > and write one up for other pages, usually replicating some of the content. > > I'm both looking for and want a solution to avoid such redundancy. > > The perfect solution would be a <summary> tag, if you look at the > journal articles on my site you can imagine the first paragraph being > done like this: > > <p><summary>This is just an example, it's a replacement for the old meta > description, and is a brief summary (description) of the page > (content)</summary></p> > > This way the first paragraph in a page would remain unchanged from how > it is done today, and a search engine like Google or screen readers etc. > would use the summary tag instead > of the meta description (which is no longer needed at all in cases like > this), if more than one summary tag the first is considered the page > summary one, while the others are ignored (but still shown as content > obviously). > > If a new tag is overkill for this, maybe doing it this way instead > (using one of the new HTML5 tags): > <p><header summary>This is just an example, it's a replacement for the > old meta description, and is a brief summary (description) of the page > (content)</header></p> > > I really do not care how this is implemented/speced just as long as it's > possible to do. > > I began thinking of this recently when it annoyed me that I basically > had to enter the same content twice, after looking at my site links in > Google, > and thought to myself...Why do I have to use a meta description to tell > Google to show the content in the first paragraph as the default summary > of the page link? > Why can't I simply specify that the first paragraph "is" the page's meta > description? Why am I forced to bloat the page unnecessarily like this? > > Thee is no reason why the meta description can not be the actual content > as in most cases I've seen the meta description is supposed to be fully > human readable, > unlike the meta keywords which no search engines bothers with at all any > more. > > So if the meta description is supposed to be humanly readable and > displayable as the page summary to humans in search results, > why can't it also actually "be" in the page content? > > I can see at least two ways this will be used. The more elegant way I > showed, where the first paragraph is a summary/the lead in of the page > (and also happens to be the "teaser" content in my RSS feed as well), > or at the bottom of a page with possibly linked category tags or similar > within it, again allowing dual purpose and reduced redundancy. > > To re-iterate, the idea of the summary tag (or however it is > implemented) should be to have a human readable summary (or teaser as > may be) of a page, which is itself shown in the page, > but also a replacement for search engines that use the old meta > description avoiding redundancy. > > End result is (hopefully) less redundancy, and higher quality summary > (page description) shown in search engine results, and so on. > Also allowing people to quickly understand what a page is about by just > reading the first paragraph (or be enticed to read more). > > Now if something like this allready exist/is possible I stand corrected > and ask, please tell me how to do that. > If not then I'd love to see something like this standardized. > > BTW! The text in the first paragraph of this very email could for > example be the summary/description of this email. > So if it was html tagged in some way, a mail indexing or search engine > could use that as the summary or description view shown to a human user > scrolling through archived emails. > > Regards, > Roger. >
The main problem with that would be that parsers would then need to read into the <body> of the page to produce a description of your site. This might not produce much of an overhead on a one-off basis, but imagine a parser that is grabbing the description from hundreds or thousands of pages, then this could become a bit of a problem. Thanks, Ash http://www.ashleysheridan.co.uk
