Metadata

Don Park wants a standard place, er, places plural, for a site's metadata. Since I seem to be grouchy already this morning, I will apply my bad mood to this idea...

I think it is absurd to try to agree on where to put "metadata" before agreeing on what the "metadata" is.

Please lead the way to save me the headache. And get the tool builders to build it for me. And then use it for a couple years so I can determine the ROI.

Thanks.

My feeling is if "metadata" is not self-generating then it has relatively little value. For example RSS is valuable "metadata".

Curiously, though, Don writes in the comments section...

I don't think .w3c should know anything about RSS. It should just be a bag of links or inlined metadata along with some useful info to help agents find what they are looking for without wasting bandwidth unnecessarily.

I am all for standardizing worthwhile metadata structure and values, where "worthwhile" is the crux of the matter. So I am more than a little surprised that this vague proposal apparently is to remain ignorant of the most significant self-generated "metadata" on the web today. Not to mention that this kind of metadata (RSS) is fractured already into multiple names, locations, and contents.

IMHO any such metadata effort should be *primarily* focused around RSS and its cousins.