While browsing Perl
7, the story of, I noticed that Perl6.org has a HTML <meta
name="description" /> tag. I also noticed that it claimed that "Perl
6 is the next major version of Perl".
(Don't worry; I fixed that.)
I spent a lot of time in the past year working with family members on websites. Part of that work required me to learn a lot more about SEO and usability. (Thank goodness for schema.org, for example.)
The meta description is highly useful. It allows a search engine to display a contextually accurate and complete (short) phrase when the engine lists the page in a result set, rather than a snippet of semi-highlighted keywords taken out of context. This, of course, can make the result list much more useful for readers.
(I've spent a lot of time adding this description to the pages here on this site. I haven't finished. I've noticed it's improved search engine traffic here and elsewhere though; it's worth it.)
When the inevitable discussion of "How can the active Perl community make itself and all of its great work more visible to the rest of the Internet?" comes back in the next two or three months, keep in mind the idea of robustness: having useful information is important, but presenting that information in a way that's easy for machines to interpret is just as important.
(I hope that Propaganda.pm is listening. I'm glad to see that perl.org is too.)
I think trivialities are no problem for Propaganda.pm
Too many people appear unaware of the need to promote a good product, mistakingly believing that "build and they will come" operates for the Perl programming language, possibly the best programming language in the world, just because we think so. We need to be more pro-active than that, which is what Propaganda.pm is actually all about.
Your comment is so true: "having useful information is important, but presenting that information in a way that's easy for machines to interpret is just as important".