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Descriptive markup offers not only more flexibility in rendering for different
devices, the information contained in the descriptive markup can be used
for many additional purposes, for example to provide a list of books
mentioned, a topical index etc. Thus these are very helpful relative to search
engines.
One of the most commonly used descriptive markup tag is META tag.
It is explained as follows:
HTML also includes a META element that goes inside the head element.
The purpose of the meta element is to provide meta-information about
the document.
Or
It’s not that search engines are existential; it’s just that when a search
engine visits a site to catalog the content on it, it’s not simply creating a
list of words that appear on the site. But the real reason is to try and
Descriptive Markup
figure out what the words on the site mean; the more meaning they can
extract, the better they’ll do at associating the site with somebody’s
search, without the user having to search for the exact words used on
the site..
The key point is that semantic tags must give the text meaning. For
example, the <EM> tag just referred to. Most browsers render this by
putting the words inside this tag in italics. There’s also a tag specifically
for “italics”: <I>. It’s shorter! Why not use that? Because of semantics.
The <I> tag instructs the browser to italicize the text, but the <EM>
means something: “emphasize this” (as opposed to straight italics,
which could be a book title, a motto, or something else entirely).
The fact that both tags look the same in a default browser configuration
is a red herring—since <EM> has actual meaning, search engines can
more easily figure out what to do with the text; this generally leads to
better ranking for the page’s topic. The differences in one tag aren’t
much, but multiply that over thousands of tags across a handful of
pages.
The web isn’t just people using web browsers on PCs and Macs. Cell
phones, PDAs, screen readers for the blind, and yes, even search
engines are non-browser devices that are interested in the content on
the site. New devices enter the market every day. In order to be “future-
proof” and not require redesign when some new gadget comes out, the
web site has to be semantic in nature, or else people with these gadgets
will have a hard time getting around on the site, or worse, be completely
locked out of it (incidentally, this is one of the reasons why there’s such
a huge difference between high quality web sites built by professionals
and the stuff one can hire the neighbor kid to do; unfortunately, it’s also
one of the things people tend to overlook until it’s too late, certainly to
their loss).
Things to do
Descriptive Markup
1. Content should be kept separate from Presentation when a site
is being written.
2. HTML is supposed to describe what the content means rather than
what it looks like.
3. Tag usage should be as minimal as possible. Pages with very few
tags almost always get better search visibility.
Things to avoid
RDF is based on the idea of identifying things using Web identifiers (called
Uniform Resource Identifiers, or URIs), and describing resources in
terms of simple properties and property values.
The basic ideas behind the RDF/XML syntax can be illustrated using
some of the examples as:
1. <?xml version="1.0"?>
2. <rdf: RDF xmlns: rdf="http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#"
3. xmlns: exterms="http://www.example.org/terms/">
4. <rdf:Description rdf:about="http://www.example.org/index.html">
5. <exterms:creation-date>August 16,
1999</exterms:creation-date>
6. </rdf:Description>
7. </rdf:RDF>
Line 2: begins an rdf:RDF element. This indicates that the following XML
content (starting here and ending with the </rdf:RDF> in line 7) is intended
to represent RDF.
Line 3: specifies another XML namespace declaration, this time for the prefix
exterms:. This is expressed as another xmlns attribute of the rdf:RDF
element, and specifies that the namespace URIref
http://www.example.org/terms/ is to be associated with the exterms:
prefix. URIrefs beginning with the string
Descriptive Markup
http://www.example.org/terms/ are used for terms from the
vocabulary defined by the example organization, example.org.
Line 4: Lines 4-6 provide the RDF/XML for the specific statement
ASSIGNMENT
Q1. Write short notes on: