Best Meta Tags To Use

[tomyknoker]

Hi All,

I know Meta tags aren't a huge thing these days but I still like to use them, just wondering what everyones thoughts were on which ones to use? I think they are way too many, obviously 'description' and 'keywords' would be important... Any others? And anyone know of any good generators?

Thanks!

[codeexploiter]

Required attribute of META tag is

Attribute name Value
--------------- --------
Content some text

Optional attributes of META tag are

Attribute name Value
--------------- --------
http-equiv content-type
expires
refresh
set-cookie

name author
description
keywords generator

scheme some text

[Twey]

"Keywords" isn't important at all nowadays. "Description" is still useful. "Author" can be handy (if it's a site for someone else, for example, and you can't add an "about the author" page). Other than that, there aren't many uses for them left.

[blm126]

I see "Generator" in use by a lot of open source CMSs

[mwinter]

Attribute name Value
--------------- --------
http-equiv content-type
expires
refresh
set-cookie


Of those, only the Content-Type value should appear with any frequency, and even then, only as a last resort.

Cache control information (the Expires header and the like) must involve the HTTP protocol. Browsers are not the only part of the network with a cache, and there's little point in stopping a browser from caching the document (and it doesn't even have to respect meta elements like that) if an intermediate cache stores the response.

The same goes for Set-Cookie: it is a protocol feature and should be sent by the server along with other HTTP headers.

As for the Refresh value, that should generally be avoided, anyway. Self-refreshing documents are a pain in the ass, and it's a bad form of redirection.

Mike