[thelist] Order of attributes in META tag

[David Bindel]

> From: Roger Ly
>
> Can anyone verify whether or not the order of attributes in a
> <meta> tag is important?  I have an application that is
> outputting <meta content="blah, blah2, blah3"
> name="keywords"> and someone is complaining that a validator
> is not finding any <meta> tags.  It seems to be validating
> quite nicely with the W3C validator.
>
> Is it just a bad parser that is looking for 'meta name="'
> that is causing the problem with this rogue validator?  Or is
> it important that the name attribute comes before the content
> attribute?  In practice, does it really matter?
> http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/struct/global.html#h-7.4.4
> doesn't seem to answer my question.  It looks like it can be
> in any order.

Syntactically, you can place then in any order and it will be correct as
to the W3C recommendation.  However, the search engines which actually
index your meta tags might not be able to recognize the values correctly
becaused of the uncommon order you have put them in.  Honestly, I'm not
really sure if they can or can't, but IMHO, it would be wise to stick
with the popular method of ordering the meta attributes: name or
http-equiv BEFORE content.


HTH,

David Bindel