kmccurley
commented
5 years ago One of the things about standards is that there are so many to choose from. Twitter, Facebook, and Google each offer things of this type, but they don't agree on the format. I think it's worth putting them in, but it's a bit of a rate hole and there are actually quite a few things we could do.
First, it's not just confined to the conference websites. The IACR calendar of events used to contain metadata for schema.org that allowed a smart snippet to show up in google search, but that got removed from the events calendar at some point. If you look at eventbrite on cryptography the page contains quite a bit of metadata to describe individual events, including the dates, location, topics, type of event, etc. The downside is that the page ends up being much larger than normal, so it carries a burden for mobile browsing. Another example is the query [software jobs san jose] that ends up showing a structured list of jobs based on metadata from sites like indeed.com and ziprecruiter.com. See this job listing where it contains a Githubissues.
By adding appropriate
<meta>tags in<head>, links to conference pages on twitter will get a more helpful preview "card" (instead of the link just appearing in the body of the tweet as text).It would be ideal if the cards contained useful conference-specific information (for example, callforpapers.html includes the submission deadline in the site summary that shows on the card). But this information is loaded from json. Unfortunately twitter won't recognize
<meta>tags generated on-the-fly by javascript. So this could be a challenge.