The List for Web Designers

One of the most underestimated elements of web design (which few people give much thought to) is the notion of metadata. Essentially, the concept behind the subject is to provide materials that describe the information’s content (data about data). Within the constructs of the web, some of the most well known uses for metadata are Meta tags, RDF data and purpose-built microformats.

There is more to life than HTML, you can play around with microformats too.

By including metadata in your documents, you can not only describe your pages in such a way that they can be better indexed by web spiders (like how libraries have indexes to find the book you’re looking for) but you can also markup the information on a page in a way that gives them added meaning and utility. An example of this is how a vCard can be coded for browsers, apps (such as an email client) and services that are set to recognize the convention.