Can we define our own meta-tags?

[dataguy]

I operate a number of search engines, some of which grab a thumbnail image of a web site when it is crawled. The crawlers are set to take the screen shot the instant that the page is fully loaded, which is fine 95% of the time.

The rest of the time, there is content in frames or maybe a Flash module that hasn't fully loaded and the thumbnail ends up looking rather bad. I can't automatically set a delay of say, 5 seconds, to wait after a page loads, because this would add up to a long time considering the number of pages that the crawlers crawl in a day.

What I'm thinking of offering is a custom tag that the webmaster can insert to tell my crawlers how long to wait after a page is loaded before the snapshot is taken.

My question is first: is there any such tag already in existance? Next, if I decide of a tag of my own, are there any suggestions as to what it should be?

Thanks!

[lammert]

You can find an (almost) complete list of available META tags at [vancouver-webpages.com...]

As far as I could see there is not one META tag for your specific purpose. You can define one yourself, but don't assume that many webmasters will implement the tag. Only very few of the tags listed at the site above are used frequently.

[dataguy]

Thanks, that is what I was looking for...

don't assume that many webmasters will implement the tag

Yeah, but I have webmasters asking for such a feature, so they are the ones I'm concerned about.