[uf-rest] ahah/xhtml and meta tags

[Dr. Ernie Prabhakar]

Hi Justin,

Welcome, and thanks for chiming in!  I can only answer "4" for sure -  
and the answer is "yes", since this is where the ahah inventors hang  
out., and that was one of the main reasons for creating the list!  By  
the same token, hopefully some of them will answer your other  
questions (I'm just the marketing guy :-).

That said, I personally think that having AHAH pages being "real"  
xhtml documents (rather than just fragments) is a good thing, for  
both debugging and indexing purposes.  However, I do worry about the  
overhead of including all that inside an existing page, and whether  
it might confuse some browsers.

One option I had considered is whether AHAH should/could specify  
"src_id" as well as "dest_id", and explicitly extract just *that*  
piece -- which should solve your problem, and making the resulting  
DOM much simpler.  This would also allow AHAH to be used with  
virtually any pre-existing HTML page (on the same site, of course),  
and even to have a single 'source' page containing all the various  
AHAH fragments you'd want to extract.

The main downside, of course, is that the pages in question would  
contain more than just that fragment, resulting in higher overhead.   
Still, that may not be significant, especially if there's other  
reasons for preferring this page arrangement.  Might this help?

Do Kevin, David, or anyone else have thoughts, either about Jason's  
problem or my proposed solution?

Jason, could you also let us know which ahah.js you're currently  
using, as that might give us a better idea of what's going on.

Thanks!

-- Ernie P.



On Jan 4, 2006, at 9:45 AM, Justin Maxwell wrote:

> Hi all,
>
> First post to the microformats list.  Many thanks to Ernie for  
> turning my attention to this.
>
> In my AHAH-driven application, the user accesses 200+ pages of  
> small descriptive content in individual xhtml pages.  Since the  
> URLs of these pages, although driven through the AHAH mechanism,  
> are publicly accessible and therefore indexable by search engines,  
> I've included meta tags in the head.
>
> These meta tags include content-type, content-language, expires,  
> author, home, index, and a refresh (in conjunction with a js  
> redirect).  The redirects (js + meta) aren't executed when accessed  
> via xmlhttprequest, but they are when a user hits the page directly.
>
> So, on to my issue.
>
> When the pages are loaded in via AHAH, so are the metas.  I can  
> remove them via node manipulation, but I'd rather not have to add  
> that step.  If the user selects all in firefox, then chooses "view  
> selected source", he/she will see meta tags nested in the middle of  
> page content.
>
> 1. Does this present a problem to accessibility?
> 2. Does this present a problem to functionality?
> 3. Should this set a precedent for the use of meta tags in AHAH  
> source content?
> (4. Is this the right forum for this discussion?)
>
> Thanks in advance,
> Justin Maxwell_______________________________________________
> microformats-rest mailing list
> microformats-rest at microformats.org
> http://microformats.org/mailman/listinfo/microformats-rest