Story Meta
Meta is a way to include context information in your Hypstory, such as the author, a description, or license information. This information may be relevant when you publish your Hypstory online or to a digital medium.
Imagine meta as a special kind of card: If a card is a block of text shown to human readers, meta is a block of information for browsers and search engines.
It is not strictly necessary to provide meta information. However, please feel encouraged to do so, because it helps machines understand what your story is and to whom it belongs.
Title and author
First, put a :META: tag on a new line. After that you can use a number of specific tags to provide meta information about your story. Two of these tags are :TITLE: and :AUTHOR:.
:TITLE: The Pizza Lottery
:AUTHOR: Alfonso Moretti, www.malfonso.hyp
:CARD: title
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/
**The Pizza Lottery – Who will eat in the end?**
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by Alfonso Moretti
/
The meta block above has two entries. After the :TITLE: tag comes the story's title. After the :AUTHOR: tag comes the name of the person who wrote the story and, potentially, a URL to their website.
- The text after both tags is limited to a maximum of 255 characters.
- When you create a playable HTML file of your Hypstory in the editor (under "finish"), the meta title will be used as the filename.
- Both meta title and author will show up in the browser window's title when you play the Hypstory file.
None of the meta information show up in your Hypstory. If you want the reader to see the story's title and the author's name, you have to put them inside a regular card.
Description and keywords
You can add a meta description and a list of keywords to your story.
:CARD: 3
As the pilot announced the upcoming landing she awoke and squinted out the window. The azure sky seemed welcoming, and she did not doubt that the tiny houses and ant-like people would be hospitable and friendly.
After the :DESCRIPTION: tag you should write a short summary of the story, describe its topic, or outline the plot.
Use the :KEYWORDS: tag to give an overview of the story's main themes.
The text after each tag is limited to a maximum of 1,000 characters.
Workflow tip: You can put any meta information on separate lines or on the same line as the :META: tag. Choose whatever makes more sense to you.
Language
You can specify the language of your Hypstory.
:LANGUAGE: en-US
:CARD: 21
But then it had started while she was still traveling. Unsavory rumors about rivaling neighbors had not evaded her. She tried to stay in good humor. This was her vacation after all.
The statement after the :LANGUAGE: tag should follow a standardized, machine readable form. It helps search engines determine the audience of your Hypstory. Also, it is the basis for software functionality such as hyphenation, spell checking, and screen reader output.
I recommend you to use a language definition according to the IANA Language Subtag Registry. If you are looking for an appropriate language tag, the language subtag lookup tool might help. Alternatively, you'll find a selection of tag examples below.
Some language subtags
A short list of language subtags:
- en for English
- es for Spanish
- pt for Portuguese
- fr for French
- de for German
- it for Italian
- sv for Swedish
- no for Norwegian
Do you think a subtag for another language should be added here? Drop me a line!
Some region subtags
While the language subtag is usually enough to indicate the language in a broader sense, a region subtag can be added to be more specific. A short list of region subtags:
- en-GB for British English
- en-US for American English
- de-DE for German spoken in Germany
- de-AT for Austrian German
- es-ES for Spanish spoken in Spain
- es-MX for Mexican Spanish
- pt-PT for Portuguese spoken in Portugal
- pt-BR for Brazilian Portuguese
Do you think a subtag for another region should be added here? Drop me a line!
License and rights
You can add licensing information and a statement about intellectual property rights to your story.
:LICENSE: CC BY-SA 4.0, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/
:RIGHTS: This story is property of Pizza Books Publishing and protected by intellectual property right laws.
:CARD: last
If you liked this story and want to read more, please visit \\https://www.malfonso.hyp/\\ or the Pizza Books Publishing Online Shop.
After the :LICENSE: tag you should put a link to a legal document. Alternatively or aditionally, write the name of the license.
Use the :RIGHTS: tag to provide a URL or write a short statement.
The character limit for license or rights information is 1,000.
Meta information is just for machines to read and will not show up in your Hypstory. Put any information on licenses and rights you want your readers to see inside a card. A good practice is to put a link to this card into the very first card of your Hypstory.
Workflow tip: Website addresses like in the example above contain valid Hypstory tags. In order for the address to be displayed correctly in a card, you need to mask them. However, inside a meta block (like in line 2 above) this is not necessary.
Automatically set meta information
The meta information described above will only be set if you as the author or publisher include it in your source text. However, there's meta information that gets set automatically by Hypstory in the playable HTML file:
Date
Hypstory sets the date to the day when you created the playable HTML file in the write section. The format of this information is YYYY-MM-DD (year, month, day), e.g. 2021-11-13.
Format and type
Hypstory specifies the format as text/html and sets some type information: InteractiveResource. This helps machines understand what a Hypstory is and which technology powers it.
Relation
Hypstory sets a relation to https://www.hypstory.org/. This relation is a reference to how your Hypstory was created and where to find further information.