Title
This page contains help and advice on the use of the MKDoc Title form field that is found on the Document Properties page and the New Document page in the editor interface.
To set or change the Title of the document simply edit the value in the form field.
The document Title is used for a number of things in MKDoc, including the weighting of search results by the internal MKDoc search engine. It is also used by external search engines.
HTML <title>
The Title, together with the Titles of a documents child documents is used for the HTML <title> element.
Web browsers generally use the <title> for the window title and for bookmarks/ favorities. The following are some examples based on this document:
This is the <title> for this page:
<title> MKDoc : Help : MKDoc 1.0 : Document Properties : Title </title>
The child document Titles are included in order to ensue that the title element makes sense out of context and in order that every document on the site has a unique <title>.
This is how the title appears in various web browsers:
<title> in Windows Internet Explorer 4
The screen shot above illustrates how the <title> is rendered by Internet Explorer 4 in Windows.
<title> in Mac Netscape 4
The screen shot above illustrates how the <title> is rendered by Netscape 4 on a Mac.
<title> in Mozilla Linux
The screen shot above illustrates how the <title> is rendered by the WindowMaker X11 window manager using Mozilla.
Specification
This is how the title is defined in the HTML 4.01 specification:
Authors should use the TITLE element to identify the contents of a document. Since users often consult documents out of context, authors should provide context-rich titles. Thus, instead of a title such as "Introduction", which doesn't provide much contextual background, authors should supply a title such as "Introduction to Medieval Bee-Keeping" instead.
Useability advice
Further advice on the use of the <title> element can be found in the section on Page Titles in Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox for November 1996: Marginalia of Web Design.
<h1>
The Title is used for the level one heading in the default MKDoc document template.
<h1> Title <h1/>
This is how the <h1> is explained on the WDG's HTML 3.2 H1 reference page:
The level 1 heading is the most important header in the document. It should be rendered more prominently than any other header. It is usually used to indicate the title of the document. Often it has the same contents as the TITLE, although this is not required and not always a good idea. The title should be useful out of context (for example, in a bookmarks file) but the level 1 heading is only used inside the document.
Links
MKDoc automatically generates hyperlinks to child documents when the Title of the child documents is entered using a HTML or Text Component.
You can see this on the parent document of this one, every occurance of the word Title will be a link to this page.
The Title is also used in the breadcrumb-trail navigation bar and the listing of child documents, both of which are dynamically generated by MKDoc.
Metadata
The Title is also used for the Dublin Core Title element, which is defined as follows:
Typically, a Title will be a name by which the resource is formally known.
And represented in HTML <head> for the current document like this:
<meta name="DC.Title" xml:lang="en-gb" content="Title" />
And in the Dublin Core RDF Metadata file for this document like this:
<dc:title xml:lang="en-gb">Title</dc:title>
Search engine
The MKDoc search engine uses the document Title as part of its ranking system. When a title of a document is searched, matches in the Title will rank higher than documents where it is found in the Document Contents.
For an illustration of this search for title on this site.
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