Re: Robot-HTML Web Page?

Nick Arnett (narnett@Verity.COM)
Thu, 30 May 1996 10:51:34 -0700


>Though I would also be interested in this, I don't think
>that such a thing exists. In fact, I believe that the purpose
>of a workshop organized by Mike Schwartz and being held next
>week in Boston is to (among other things) look into appropriate
>standards/conventions for just this kind of functionality.

Yes, the workshop did so. What's more, we came up with some very specific
proposals for how to do this using META tags, LINKs and storage of schemas
on Web servers, for easy access to human-readable element (sometimes a/k/a
field) definitions.

The summaries are being passed around the people who attended the workshop
for review; we should see them available to all in a day or two, I'd
imagine. I think we accomplished quite a bit in this area; methods that
don't break existing pages, robots, browsers, etc., but finally give us
meta-information not only for individual pages, but *finally* also for
groups of documents.

One of the workshop BOFs also came up with specifics for passing
information similar to "robots.txt" in individual pages. That should show
up here shortly, too.

Nick