Why doesn't HTML have a "slogan" tag?

Question

It seems really obvious to me that there should be a "slogan" tag in addition to the "title" tag. Many, perhaps most, websites use their business name with a slogan in their title. Unfortunately, it means that every time I bookmark a site I seem to have to edit the properties to remove the stupid slogan from the bookmark name.

The behavior would be real simple: the slogan's text gets concatenated with the title's text to form the title in the browser window. But bookmarks and such would only use the title text.

This seems like a win-win situation for the web.

Answer 1

Not that I'm on the W3C committee, but seems like the language is complete w/o the slogan tag, so why add it? When they find real gaps, they'll add them to the language.

Clearly, they favor deprecating unnecessary tags, which I think it's a good idea when talking about a language.

Answer 2

I think a better solution would be a bookmarkname tag, which would be separate from the title and, if present, would be used instead of title for bookmarks.

This would be much more flexible than your idea.

Answer 3

HTML doesn't have a slogan tag, because it's too specific. Many people and even web developers don't know how to use the title tag correctly. For that matter many webdevelopers don't use many tags correctly. The problem, like many things, is that there's freedom to be stupid.

Answer 4

It wouldn't help. The websites would still add their slogan in the title regardless. Two places would be bonus for them.

Answer 5

We already have the description meta tag which, while being a little different in purpose and usage to your idea, is already grossly under-utilised and under-implemented. And really, most of this 'baggage' that we find in the title tag should probably be in the description meta tag anyway.

We don't need yet another tag to worry about, fiddle around with, or further ambiguate the 'canonical' way of implementing the web (which plenty of lazy people ignore as it is).

Answer 6

Thanks god the browser's title bar doesn't get automatically resized to let the whole page title be shown complete, because if it did, most webspammers would put the whole body of the page on the title tag!

Answer 7

An insight into this sort of question comes from this exchange (http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-html/2009Sep/0041.html) between Jonas Sicking (Mozilla) and Adrian Bateman (Microsoft).

They're discussing the <dialog> element (since dropped from the HTML5 draft) but it could be any new element.

Jonas:

Indeed, implementing <dialog> in a browser is trivial. A feature that isn't used, or mostly used wrongly, still adds a cost (spec bloat, tutorial bloat, author confusion, name collisions with future features etc), my concern is purely that.

Adrian:

This is our concern too but I'd add test cost to the list. Every feature that we add has a significant test cost making sure it has been added exactly as the spec requires, testing for accidental regressions, and adding all the new test cases to our automation tools (plus the time the additional tests take to run from then on).

Answer 8

While I agree that it's fairly trivial in the grand scheme of things, and that slogan is too spesific ('strap' maybe a better option), this isn't such a awful idea.

Straplines are a common component of many webpages if 'strap' was a child of the body and head tags it would add some additional meaning to pages in general (particularly for blind users) - at least as much as the 'address' tag does.

1) Where's the harm in the discussion.

2) Title tags have so little meaning, they're so abused, why not at least THINK (rather than beign rude to the poster) about a better system especially given the explosion of mobile internet devices, non-visual devices readers and the like - could we add anything to the standard which would help provide better semantic structure?