987377 - When no SEO summary is available, look to see if a "summary" is available

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(developer.mozilla.org Graveyard :: General, defect)

Description

[Eric Shepherd [:sheppy]]

What feature should be changed? Please provide the URL of the feature if possible.
==================================================================================
There are two CSS classes for setting page summaries. One is seoSummary, which marks a block specifically as the page's SEO summary. If this page doesn't exist, however, we should fall back to looking for the "summary" class, which is used to establish a summary block that gets displayed specially at the top of the page.

What problems would this solve?
===============================
Some pages have summary blocks that should also be the SEO summary; currently, trying to do both is awkward because it means repeating content.

Who would use this?
===================
Editors.

What would users see?
=====================
Improved SEO text and better auto-built menus.

What would users do? What would happen as a result?
===================================================
No change.

Is there anything else we should know?
======================================

Comment 1

[ali spivak]

Where, exactly, is this information supposed to be used??? In our Search results? In Google, etc? I'm kind of confused as to why this is needed. 

I assume you mean the class: <h2 id="Summary">???
Not all pages have this, e.g.: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/article

We've also recently set up a contribution path to mark up summaries, see: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/MDN/Contribute/Howto/Set_the_summary_for_a_page

Comment 2

[John Karahalis [:openjck]]

If "summary" is so conceptually similar to "seosummary" that it can be used in its place, I would recommend that we use only one term in the interface and have a separate setting for summary appearance.

Comment 3

[Jean-Yves Perrier [:teoli]]

I think we should for <meta description> use (by order of accuracy)

1. The text (eventually in chunks) marked as SEO summary.
2. If none, use the summary marked for zones pages. (Eventually trimmed if too long)
3. If none, use the first paragraph (title "Summary" or not). (Eventually trimmed if too long)

To include a summary in other pages:
1. If none, use the summary marked for zones pages. (Eventually trimmed if too long)
2. If none, use the first paragraph (title "Summary" or not). (Eventually trimmed if too long)

In other words, do not use the SEO summary in the second case. Also the trimming algorithm may be slightly different in both case (trimming with ellipsis at word-boundary vs trimming at sentence-boundary except in exceptional cases like ridiculously long sentences).

SEO summary is something may be quite different than a summary to be read.

Comment 4

[Eric Shepherd [:sheppy]]

(In reply to Jean-Yves Perrier [:teoli] from comment #3)

> In other words, do not use the SEO summary in the second case. Also the
> trimming algorithm may be slightly different in both case (trimming with
> ellipsis at word-boundary vs trimming at sentence-boundary except in
> exceptional cases like ridiculously long sentences).

I'm curious why not; the SEO summary is usually actually quite good for this, since it tends to very succinctly describe what the content of the page is about, which is exactly what you want here.

Comment 5

[John Karahalis [:openjck]]

Yeah. That's basically what I'm getting at.

The two seem very similar conceptually. We could simplify the implementation and, more importantly, the interface by not drawing a distinction when one is not obvious.

Comment 6

[Eric Shepherd [:sheppy]]

John: the "summary" is intended to be presented as a promotional blurb in the page header and is not necessarily as informational as the seoSummary is. It's more promotional than informational a lot of the time. I personally don't like that we even have it, but it's part of the redesign.

Comment 7

[John Karahalis [:openjck]]

That should work fine as a meta description, right?

I'm skeptical of the value of writing summaries specifically for computers, especially when human-readable summaries already exist. Summaries that are valuable to people should also be considered valuable by search engines (at least any search engines worth their salt).

Comment 8

[Eric Shepherd [:sheppy]]

(In reply to John Karahalis [:openjck] from comment #7)
> That should work fine as a meta description, right?
> 
> I'm skeptical of the value of writing summaries specifically for computers,
> especially when human-readable summaries already exist. Summaries that are
> valuable to people should also be considered valuable by search engines (at
> least any search engines worth their salt).

I agree. The thing is, that seoSummary and summary serve different purposes:

seoSummary is intended to explain what the page is about in basic terms, without posturing. For example, the HTML landing page might say "HTML (HyperText Markup Language) is the basic language that describes the content of a document on the Web."

summary is a promotional blurb and may have more flowery language. For example, for the HTML landing page, it might be "MDN's complete guide to HTML offers an extensive reference as well as tutorials and sample code to help you learn everything you want to know."

There's a difference in purpose there.

Comment 9

[BMO Automation]

MDN Web Docs' bug reporting has now moved to GitHub. From now on, please file content bugs at https://github.com/mdn/sprints/issues/ and platform bugs at https://github.com/mdn/kuma/issues/.