Re: Shortened titles in Yelp

[Alexander Kirillov <kirillov math sunysb edu>]

On Sun, 2002-07-14 at 05:45, Martijn van Beers wrote:

> > Hence the problem to be solved - how
> > do we make sure OMF files contain a title that help browser developers can
> > use without a fear of getting bugs files against them or confusing users.
> > The easiest way is to just put the short title in <title>...</title> and
> > put teh long one somewhere else (like the description field), but as
> > noted, that has its own drawbacks.
> 
> No, this is not the problem to be solved. OMF files contain metadata
> about a document. title is metadata. author is metadata. but
> title butchered up so that a certain obscure html renderer can display
> it according to certain people's aesthetic taste is definitely not.
> 

Short title *is* metadata. It does carry some information about the
document which is independent of presentation (e.g., the short title is
also commonly used in page headers) and it can not be extracted from
full title (if needed, I can give you many examples when short title
reflects author's perspective on what is the most important aspect of
the work). So it is metadata. Of course, it is not as widely used as
title, it is not in Dublin Core - so what?  And of course, it should be 
optional - many docs do not have or do not need short title. But some
docs can benefit from specifying a short title. 

Sasha