Chapter 18. XHTML Document Profiling

Up until this point we've discussed the technologies behind creating XHTML documents, as well as defining and validating their grammars. The next step in managing a set of Web documents is to work with them as a collection. To manage, sort, or otherwise document the properties of a collection, you must first know what each individual member of that set represents. To that end, methods have been developed to describe and categorize documents as a larger part of information management systems.

XHTML has facilities for describing documents that are compatible with these efforts, and the future holds promise for several more techniques that will further enhance the abilities for XHTML.

This chapter teaches you:

• What metadata is

• How metadata is included in XHTML documents

• How to build descriptive meta elements

• How to use meta elements to suggest HTTP response headers