Frank Leahy is a friend and former-colleague from Wired. He was responsible for creating one of the primary Content Management Systems used at Lycos, and made significant contributions to the engineering effort when we redesigned Wired News last year. Frank left Wired a couple months ago, and he and his family of four recently picked up their lives and moved to England, settling temporarily in what looks like an amazing location: Cornwall. Understandably, Frank immediately has more time, and so much to write about that he’s started his own weblog, titled “A Year in Cornwall“.
I point this out, not just because I know Frank, but for three reasons: 1) From the beginning, he’s been inserting photo thumbnails into each entry, showing a portion of his family’s life and his new surroundings. Admittedly, he only has a few entries so far, and I have no idea if he continues to plan to supplement each entry with a photo, but it’s a nice touch. I’m looking forward to following his story, and seeing more photos. 2) I’m expecting something interesting out of Frank, knowing what he was capable of doing with us at Wired. Frank is already using MT, and he’s only hinted to me so far at a couple of things he’s been working on combining MT, PHP, and photo display. 3) Frank’s latest entry, How To Make Photos More Searchable raises a few interesting ideas about how more meta information could be added to online photos. Frank suggests inserting attributes into the <img> tag like geo-position, descriptive keywords, author, exposure settings, and camera information. He’s also dreaming up several ideas for enhancing RSS photo feeds.
I’m sure Frank has considered using the existing title, alt, and infrequently-used longdesc attributes of the img tag within XHTML for this meta information. But it sounds like he’s looking for something more specific and appropriate. While I’m not certain the XHTML specification would be modified to take in his suggestions, all things are possible with XML. If you have additional knowledge, ideas, suggestions, or feedback, leave your thoughts in the comments on his entry.