Google and XHTML

Support it or no?

[Oaf357]

I find it unusual that Google isn't pulling XHTML description tags from my pages. Anyone else seeing similar results?

[Made In Sheffield]

What do you mean by XHTML description tags? If you mean meta descriptions they're no different from HTML meta descriptions, as long as you're talking about XHTML 1.0, it's HTML 4.01 compliant after all.

What makes you think they're not getting pulled?

[Oaf357]

META description tags are different in XHTML the / is the problem.

The reason I think this is because Google is just pulling text out of the page and not the description.

If I use the SEW Spider it doesn't even see the XHTML description. Change it to HTML 4.01 it sees it.

[andreasfriedrich]

If you want to be sure that UAs can parse meta [w3.org] elements use the long syntax for empty elements:

<meta [w3.org] name [w3.org]="" content [w3.org]=""></meta [w3.org]> 

Andreas

[Oaf357]

Hmm... is that W3C compliant? I would imagine it is but I'll have to check.

[bcolflesh]

Does Google even use data from meta tags? I thought the concensus here on the board was to the contrary.

Regards,
Brent

[Oaf357]

It is W3C compliant. I'm still a little wary about it though. But, the Sim Spider works on the description. It's a lot of pages I'd have to update, so I'm going to do some more testing. Thanks.