[thesite] An idea regarding article submissions

Sat Dec 8 18:10:18 CST 2001

Hey everyone,

I just had an idea of a feature that could be added to article submissions
that I thought I'd share. I haven't really thought it through properly but
I figured I'd chuck it out here and see what people thought.

Essentially the idea is to add an additional field in the article
submission form where the author could type anything they wanted to appear
in the document <head>. This could include javascript, css (either inline
or linked) and meta tags (in particular keywords, title, description and
author).

Obviously you don't want authors styling things too much but I can think
of a few examples where this would be useful. In this article of mine for
instance:

<http://www.evolt.org/article/link/17/16676/index.html>

I was forced to link to an example rather than including one in the page
because I couldn't stick @import in the article header directly.

Because articles are all manually approved any malicious stuff could be
filtered out before going live, and authors could be given a guide to
acceptable usage.

I'm not sure, but I also think that this would be pretty easy to
implement. Just add an extra field to the form and articles table and
include the header field when the page is generated.

Just an idea - feel free to point out the obvious flaws that I haven't
thought of!

Simon