I put the META menu into PocketPad primarily because of Jeff Duntemann's Virtual Encyclopedia of Absolutely Everything. The history of this has been unfolding in, first PC Techniques and recently in the recast Visual Developer Magazine. It's a vision of the "web content" with a patterning "laid upon it" so that the content is not just searchable, but useable as a research tool.

But METAdata has been used in HTML'd materials from very early. That's information about the information that's available. If you have an article, the author's name will be in it, of course, in a by-line or whatever. But it's useful to have "header" information with specific "Author is" information. And a succinct description of the article might also be useful. This sort of information can be tailored to the type of material made available and to the type of search and examination involved in obtaining materials to research. In fact, it should not be visible to the researcher once he or she has the materials at hand for reading, listening or viewing -- except as something separate.

The HTML solution is the META tag. The content will not show in the browser. The tag has two "fill in" items: name and content. The name= is the label on a box and the content= is what's in the box. For instance, name="author" and "content="Gene Fowler" would be a valid pair of entries.

I've put on the META menu META tags that are partly filled in and with the cursor placed. These have to do with the Virtual Encyclopedia, though some are quite generally used. You can, of course, organize such a "body of tags" for any organization or use. META tags go in the HTML HEAD section, but a planned block of them is a "header" in itself for your organization or use system. Thinking in terms of such identifying and organizing headers accompanying your "materials" is a useful practice that will influence even the gathering and building of those materials. And this is particularly true in PocketPad's context, where all HTML tagging, remember, is known as a writer's punctuating of (unusually inclusive) text. You might think of the METAdata as a "second flow" of text that stays within the writer's head ...but is accessible in a separate reading.

If you want some partially-filled META tags of your own, you can build a set of boilerplates utilizing the "loaded revolver cylinders" and the BP Import / export system with bplates.set. See the on-line Help.

Once I took a screen photo of PocketPad with the META menu dropped down and the following text just below the menu in the editor.

If you click on the general META item on the Meta menu, two InputQuery
dialogs come up in sequence to take the name= and content= terms:
<META name="PutInName" content="PutInNamed">

The next five take just one item in a single InputQuery dialog.
<META name="objecttype" content="encyclopedia">
<META name="language" content="EN">
<META name="knowledgepath" content="Philosophy | epistemology">
<META name="localitypath" content="global">
<META name="author" content="Gene Fowler">

And the last two do not use an InputQuery, but simply leave the cursor
between the last quote marks for typing.
<META name="description" content="|">
<META name="keywords" content="|">

Look into "metadata" and the Virtual Encyclopedia of Absolutely Everything!

Gene Fowler
July, 1997