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<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
That was a piece of cake. Now what?
About those meta tags - isn't this form also valid?
<meta name="description" contents="Ladle read rotten hut"></meta>
Why would they have to? They only need to be able to ignore it. If you place a space before the /, then they will treat it as an "unknown attribute" to the respective tag. If you leave away the space, then a simplistic parser may not be able to seperate the / from the preceding tag name or attribute. And you don't want it to appear at the end of your description in a SERP, do you? ;)
About those meta tags - isn't this form also valid?
<meta name="description" contents="Ladle read rotten hut"></meta>
From the XHTML 1.0 specification [w3.org]:
...
[big]Appendix C. HTML Compatibility Guidelines[/big]
This appendix is informative.
...
[big]C.2 Empty Elements[/big]
Include a space before the trailing / and > of empty elements, e.g. <br />, <hr /> and <img src="karen.jpg" alt="Karen" />. Also, use the minimized tag syntax for empty elements, e.g. <br />, as the alternative syntax <br></br> allowed by XML gives uncertain results in many existing user agents.
...
So yes, the </meta> would be technically valid, but probably not a good idea. I'd avoid the experiment with a real site.
I have had absolutely no problem with my XHTML sites with any of the major search engines.
So I agree with tedster and disagree with bird, based off my personal experience.
I recommend that you always use <meta></meta> instead of <meta />.
I cannot find anything on the W3C spec that clarifies this. I always view the source code of the W3C pages to see what they are doing and they use the " /> format.
My goal is to follow the spec and not take any shortcuts if I don't have to.
In regards to XHTML and its current status, do you see the web making a transition to XHTML or will this end up being a long drawn out battle like CSS?
And, in the case of simplistic brochureware sites, would it be necessary to make the conversion? Are there any advantages from an SEO standpoint. I read what detlev had to say in the post mentioned above but I'm not fully understanding the implications just yet.
Okay, so there are three methods to closing off the <meta> tags...
1. " />
2. </meta>
3. <meta />
The first one is not recognized by the spidering programs I am using and it is the recommended format by the W3C. The second two spider fine. What concerns me is the W3C recommendation which does not mention the use of #2 and #3. So, where is the XHTMLGuy?
(edited by: pageoneresults at 5:57 pm (utc) on Mar. 22, 2002)
Uh, what exactly is this supposed to mean?
If you put that in like this literally, then you have a serious problem (an unclosed string attribute). Or is this a shorthand for something else?
That is the W3C recommendation for closing off the <meta> tags. Here is a piece of meta from their own site...
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1" />
I should have included the content before the <" to make sure there was no confusion. I'm not closing off the meta with <" />. Sorry, I updated my post above and eliminated the beginning <.
<meta name="author" content="author name" />
The space and a slash before the final angle bracket is valid as meta is an empty element.
DG
Okay, that puts me back to my original question. If the spidering programs I'm using (including Brett's) don't recognize the W3C recommendation, what does one do?
Google has absolutely no problem with it, but then again, Google will index the contents of your cigar humidor if they find a link to it. :)
I don't know if the bots you are using have any support for XML. With XML, more than any other markup, I find it especially important to go with the W3C recommendations. The browser developers are particularly lost as are most search engines when it comes to XML so I expect they will look first to the W3C when developing for it.
DG
On a side note, Brett, is the SIM Spider set up to validate XHTML properly?
XML data can be processed without a DTD. If the XML is well-formed all the entities are declared. In many instances a DTD is used during the authoring, then discarded as it slows processing.
Spiders may need the DTD now, although I've seen well-formed XML documents properly indexed, but that shouldn't be a long term requirement.
DG
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1" />
I have been following the recommended specs since converting to xhtml early last year.
Since migrating to XHTML my pages have had great success in the SERPS, this is why I believe there will be a strong migration to XHTML & CSS - the optimized pages are much more "spider friendly."
Especially when use of tables is limited to "tabular" data and not used for layouts.
I was finding that some of the spiders were getting confused, but that was over a year ago. That's why I recommend the closing tag. Both are valid XHTML, but as we all know, just because it's in the spec doesn't mean that the parser handles it correctly.
