Strange news from my strange friend Gaks^[1].

He's forwarded me a fragment of the w3c's proposed new attribute: 'tags' which is defined for almost every html element.

A 'tags' attribute acts as a flexible meta-data repository, and here's how you use it:

Say you want to link to a document, and you want to 'tag' that document as being 'funny', 'rude', 'useful' and pertaining to a few key topics such as 'html', 'xml' and 'css' (and why shouldn't it?) then your anchor element could include a 'tags' attribute like this:

Gaks tells me that this is particularly useful when used in conjunction with the whatg's Web Forms 3.0 specification of a tagCloud control. I have yet to find out how one of those works.

Gaks further says that the best new attribute in html is 'time', defined for anchor elements, which lets you specify not just where a link points, but when. Relative-time values can be used for fetching tomorrow's newspaper headlines today, and so on, which causes hell for rss aggregators etc.