Don't want website description on all pages

[EllaKaye]

Description

Suppose I have a description in _quarto.yml for a website, e.g.

format:
  html:
    description: "R Foundation taskforce on women and other under-represented groups."

Then that description appears under the title on all pages of the website, unless an alternative description is given on the specific page. If I don't want to see a description on a given page, the quickest fix (as far as I'm aware) is to set description: "". This is only my opinion, but this seems non-optimal to me.

I would prefer the description in _quarto.yml to appear under the title on the index page, but not to display on other pages, by default. I would, however, still like the website description carried over as page metadata if no page-specific description is given, just not shown in the body of the page.

Is there any other way around this? I assume this is a deliberate feature, but might the Quarto team consider changing the current behaviour, as per my suggestion above?

[mcanouil]

If you put something under format, it means you explicitly want this to appear in all documents for that formats.

It's unlikely a change the Quarto team would be willing to do as it would break nearly all websites relying on the fact you can set options under format.

If you want the description to be on a single page, then set only on that page.
If you eventually want to reuse the description under website. then you can use variables to store the string.

[EllaKaye]

Of course! Absolute brain-fart moment from me. Thanks for the reminder that the correct place for description is under website.

[mcanouil]

It's not incorrect to place it where you've put it, but the effect is not the same.

[EllaKaye]

Thanks for the clarification 😄 description under website gets me the behaviour I want for now, and good to be reminded about the difference compared to format.

[mcanouil]

Please don't close, we keep the discussions open as the default search filter exclude closed discussions.