Does this invalidate a meta tag?

Trailing forward slash at the end

[fom2001uk]

I've noticed that one of our CMS packages inserts a trailing "/" at the end of META DESCRIPTIONS and KEYWORDS.

e.g

<META NAME='KEYWORDS' DESCRIPTION="This is my description, etc......" />

I queried this at the time but our developer assured me this was valid HTML.

Maybe it is, but my worry is that spiders will not read this now. Having just run some pages through a spider simulator, I was shocked to see that it did NOT pick up META DESCRIPTION or KEYWORDS tags.

Can anyone confirm that this is indeed invalid from the spider's point of view?

[creative craig]

The trailing slash makes its a XHTML tag.

Craig

[fom2001uk]

So will spiders still recognise it alright?

[creative craig]

Yep, they find their way through my sites ok :)

Craig

[Dreamquick]

If it validates at correct syntax using the W3C validator then it's legitimate for your chosen markup version, end of discussion on its validity. In this case the trailing slash is an XHTML feature rather than HTML AFAIK.

Real spiders have no problems dealing with meta-tags that are formatted like this - I've been using this style for well over a year and have no problems either being crawled or with spiders interpretting/parsing it.

The real problem is that spider simulators don't have to adapt to the ever-changing structure of the web and markup, for all you know the spider sim you're using could have been designed to work with an old HTML implementation and it's code hasn't been updated to deal with the newer markup.

- Tony

[fom2001uk]

Okay, thanks for the reassurance. I was worried when two different spider sims failed to pick up these tags.

Fault is with the sims, then :-)

[SuzyUK]

no it doesn't invalidate the tag .. but I'm not sure what the spiders think, last time I tested the tags weren't being parsed

so to be sure and still to be correct/valid XHTML I've changed my tags to

<meta........></meta>

a case of better safe than sorry ;)
Suzy

[creative craig]

There is no problem with XHTML and search engine spiders. I have had sites with compliant XHTML for a year or more now and rank well on many search terms.

Craig