Description

The description field on the MKDoc 1.0 editor interface Document Properties page is designed to be used for a short, abstract, summary of the document.

To set or change the Description of the document simply edit the value in the form field.

The Description should be designed to be read out of context since it is used by some external search engines to describe the document.

The Description is used by the internal MKDoc search engine when documents are ranked. Words found in the Description field will result in the page being ranked above pages where the words are only found within the document body.

Dublin Core Abstract Description

The MKDoc document Description is also used as the Dublin Core abstract description of the document.

Following is the way in which the Dublin Core Qualifiers specification defines an abstract title:

A summary of the content of the resource.

This is how the current documents DC description is representated in the head of this document:

<meta name="DC.Description.Abstract" 
      xml:lang="en-gb" 
      content="Help and advice about the use of the 
               Description metadata field in the MKDoc 
               1.0 editor interface." />

And this is how it is representated in the DC RDF metadata file for this document:

<dcq:abstract xml:lang="en-gb">
  Help and advice about the use of the Description 
  metadata field in the MKDoc 1.0 editor interface.
</dcq:abstract>

<meta> Description

MKDoc uses the Description for the HTML <meta> description used by search engines such as AltaVista. For example this is what the search result for the MKDoc home page looks like on AltaVista:

The thing to note here is that the Description has been truncated because of its length (186 characters) - you should try to keep Descriptions to between 100 and 150 characters.

This is how the <meta> Description that is used by some external search engines is represented in the HTML head of this document:

<meta name="description" 
      content="Help and advice about the use of the 
               Description metadata field in the MKDoc 
               1.0 editor interface." />

If you want to know more about the HTML meta tags then the Dmoz page of meta tag links is a good place to start.