Sim Spider and XHTML

Sim Spider misses valid metas?

[quiet_man]

Just tried the Sim Spider tool on a URL and was surprised that it reported no meta description or meta keywords. The page in question uses valid XHTML and does indeed contain the meta tags that Sim Spider missed.

So I take off the closing forward slash from these tags (ie. from <meta name="description" content="blah" /> to <meta name="description" content="blah"> ).
Low and behold, Sim Spider can see the meta tags now. But the page won't validate.

So my question is, is this an oversight in the Sim Spider programme, or should I be worried that important spiders might overlook these valid XHTML metas too?

[Brett_Tabke]

There's nothing specific in there to support xhtml.

Do any search engines claim they suppor Xhtml in documentation?

[quiet_man]

>>Do any search engines claim they suppor Xhtml in documentation? <<
Is this a rhetorical question? Sorry if I sound clueless, but I really don't know. Does this mean that important search engines (Google, FAST, Ink) might not recognise the meta tags on pages that use valid XHTML?
(btw, I'm sorry if my original post read like a criticism of the Sim Spider programme. It certainly wasn't intended that way. I genuinely wanted to know if it accurately reflected the behaviour of the major spiders. If they don't in fact index the meta description tag - as we know, the keywords tag is much less important anyway - of pages written in XHTML, well that's really news to me).

[bird]

I really doubt that any search engine would ignore a meta tag just because it includes an attribute "/" at the end. After all, the pre-XML HTML definitions require all conforming parsers to simply ignore unknown tag attributes. However, you should make sure that there's always a space before the "/", or some not-so-smart parsers will assume it to be a part of the preceding attribute.

All that doesn't mean that any engine will even look at your meta tags, of course. Just that if it ignores them, the "/" required by XHTML is very unlikely to be the reason.

[Brett_Tabke]

I'm just looking for something that says a search engine will support xhtml somewhere. It's used so little, and se's are using the same stuff from years ago, that it makes me wonder.

I dug through alta earlier today and couldn't find a xhmtl based page. Have one indexed you can show me QM?

I don't want to support something that isn't known to be supported by the se's. It's not something that would be cool to be wrong about.

[HarryM]

My site has not yet been indexed by Google, but my home page has by Inkomi. It shows up in MSN and displays the text entered in the Title and the Meta Description tags.

The site is XHTML transitional and all my meta tags end />

Unfortunately I can't show you as I can't figure out how to make my site URL display in my profile :)

[quiet_man]

Brett - sorry, the site I was testing is a new one. It currently has a 'fresh' listing in Google, but this coming update will be its first.

If you need a URL to test, you could always try the NYPL guide. Hope its OK to post the URL here, is it a very authoritative source on xhtml, has been indexed by Google, and (unlike w3.org's xhtml site) has meta description and keywords tags:

[nypl.org...]

[Added] Just did a quick check of this URL on Alta Vista, and AV does indeed list the meta description as the first line of the description on its SERPs