XHTML compliant meta tags & search engines

Do they cause problems?

[biggles]

I've been told by a web developer that for meta tags to be xhtml 1.1 compliant they must be closed; i.e. have these end characters '/>' rather than just '>'

Running pages with these tags thru the W3C htmp compliance checker (http://validator.w3.org) reports these closing tags as errors.

Anyone know please what, if any, impact using xhtml compliant closing tags as on search engines.

Thanks in advance

[encyclo]

What doctype are you declaring on your page, biggles, and what specific error messages are you getting? It sounds as if you are declaring a HTML doctype (or none at all) rather than an XHTML doctype.

As for search engine support of trailing slashes on meta tags, I don't believe any major ones have any problem with it.

[moltar]

I can confirm from experience that SEs read proper XHTML meta tags without a problem.

[Gusgsm]

Running pages with these tags thru the W3C htmp compliance checker (http://validator.w3.org) reports these closing tags as errors.

No. They do validate. There must be something else in your page. Would you paste and post its relevant parts? (I think the head would be enough)