Introduction

By establishing HTML metadata standards and defining new XML-based file formats, content providers, e.g., Wikipedia, could specify data, resources, and endpoints (e.g., XML-RPC endpoints) in webpage metadata for search engines, e.g., Bing, DuckDuckGo, and Google, to provide end-users with enhanced snippets as indicated in the following visualization.

Visualization

 

To what regions are cherry blossom trees indigenous?

 

Logo of content provider

Japan

 

Most flowering cherry trees are native to Japan and other parts of Asia, and they are roughly adapted to U.S. Department of Agriculture plant hardiness zones 5 to 8, though specific climate requirements vary among different varieties. April 6, 2020

 

View

Edit

Comment

Discuss

Upvote

Downvote

Subscribe

Share

 

Discussion of Visualization

The logo of the content provider could also function as either a hyperlink to the content provider’s main page or a hyperlink to the same address as the “view” menu option.

 

A search engine could present multiple answers from one or more content providers in response to an end-user’s question.

Menu Items

View

When selected, this menu option allows end-users to navigate to source content in context. This may involve a hyperlink using text fragments. With HTML metadata, content providers could override this default behavior, for example requesting a copy of the text fragment to a specified URL query parameter.

Edit

When selected, this menu option allows end-users to navigate to content providers’ pages for editing content.

Comment1

When selected, this menu option allows end-users to enter a comment on the search engine website, e.g., in a popup-styled widget, and this text comment is relayed to the content provider via XML-RPC.

Comment2

When selected, this menu option allows end-users to navigate to content provider website to comment on source content.

Discuss

When selected, this menu option allows end-users to navigate to content provider pages for discussing source content.

Upvote/Downvote1

When selected, these menu options allow users to upvote/downvote a snippet on the search engine.

Upvote/Downvote2

When selected, these menu options allow users to upvote/downvote a snippet on the content provider.

Subscribe1

When selected, this menu option allows end-users to subscribe to receive notifications from the search engine when source content, e.g., the answer to a question, changes or is updated.

Subscribe2

When selected, this menu option allows end-users to subscribe to receive notifications from the content provider when source content, e.g., the answer to a question, changes or is updated.

Share1

When selected, this menu option allows end-users to share the snippet with other end-users. The shared URL in this scenario is from the search engine.

Share2

When selected, this menu option allows end-users to share the snippet with other end-users. The shared URL in this scenario is from the content provider, perhaps with a text fragment affixed to the shared URL.

Content View Reporting

Related topics include content providers being able to specify endpoints to receive pings and aggregated pings from search engines for relaying views and usage data. An aggregated ping is a report which includes aggregated views and usage data, e.g., hourly, daily, or weekly views and usage data.

Potential Next Steps

Interested individuals and organizations could create and participate in a new W3C Community Group to discuss these and related topics and to develop HTML metadata and XML-based document formats.

Conclusion

Thank you. I hope that these ideas were of some interest to you.

 

 

 

Best regards,

Adam Sobieski

http://www.phoster.com