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Chapter 3 E-business infrastructure 143

<META name="keywords" content="phone directory, address
book">
<META name="description" content="An online phone book">
<META name="date" content="2005-11-06T08:49:37+00:00">
</HEAD>

One application of meta-tags and an illustration of meta-data is that they are used by search
engines to identify the content of documents. Early search engines such as AltaVista ranked
documents higher in their listings which had meta-keywords that corresponded to the words
typed into the search engine by its user. This led to abuse by companies that might include
the name of their competitor or repeat keywords several times in the meta-tags, a process
known as ‘search engine spamming’. As a result, most search engines now attach limited
importance to the keyword meta-tags – in fact Google does not use them at all for ranking
purposes, but may use them to identify unique documents. However, most search engines
including Google do attach relevance to the <TITLE> tag, so it is important that this does
not just contain a company name. For example, easyJet.com used the following title tag which
incorporates the main phrases potential visitors may type into a search engine.

<title>easyJet.com – easyjet low cost airline, easy jet, flight,
air fares, cheap flights</title>

The limited capability within HTML for meta-data and data exchange has been acknowl-
XML or eXtensible edged and, in an effort coordinated by the World Wide Web Consortium, the first XML or
Markup Language
eXtensible Markup Language was produced in February 1998. This is not strictly a
Standard for transferring
structured data, unlike replacement for HTML since HTML and XML can coexist – they are both markup lan-
HTML which is purely guages. To help developers use HTML and XML together a new standard, confusingly
presentational.
known as XHTML, was adopted. XHTML and XML are based on Standardized General
Markup Language (SGML). The key word describing XML is ‘extensible’. This means that
new markup tags can be created that facilitate the searching and exchange of information.
For example, product information on a web page could use the XML tags <NAME>,
<DESCRIPTION>, <COLOUR> and <PRICE>. Example of tags relevant to a product cata-

logue are shown below.

Example XML for online marketplace catalogue
This example is a standard for publishing catalogue data. It can be seen that specific
tags are used to identify:
Product ID
Manufacturer
Long and short description
Attributes of product and associated picture.
There is no pricing information in this example.
<CatalogData>
<Product>
<Action Value5"Delete"/>