Meta tags stopping website from HTML5 validating

1
votes

I am trying to improve the validity of the HTML on my website, but several errors in the meta tags are showing up as invalid, and I'm unsure how to alter them in order to remove the errors.

<meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=edge,chrome=1">

Bad value X-UA-Compatible for attribute http-equiv on element meta.

<meta name="msvalidate.01" content="4E24196986E1212B82C272A021495004"/>

Attribute name not allowed on element meta at this point.

<meta name="msvalidate.01" content="4E24196986E1212B82C272A021495004"/>

Element meta is missing required attribute itemprop.

<meta name="p:domain_verify" content="5dd1c5f2db0ac0b521f08d56b4cd271b">

Attribute name not allowed on element meta at this point. Element meta is missing required attribute itemprop.

<meta http-equiv="content-language" content="en">

Attribute http-equiv not allowed on element meta at this point. Element meta is missing required attribute itemprop.

<meta http-equiv="content-language" content="en">

Using the meta element to specify the document-wide default language is obsolete. Consider specifying the language on the root element instead.

Thanks in advance for any help!

D.

1
htmlmeta
What doc type are you using? Where are you validating this (url?) and where are you placing these meta tags? - outrunthewolf
I'm experiencing this error too, using html5. Until few weeks ago it passed the validation. - Giona
My website is tinyurl.com/8uaajmz. It's a private e-commerce system (we bought a licence for it from someone else), and this info is in the header section. - Dan
Ps: I'm validating using W3C and the link is validator.w3.org/… - Dan

1 Answers

5
votes

You have to bear in mind that the validator says:

The validator checked your document with an experimental feature: HTML5 Conformance Checker. This feature has been made available for your convenience, but be aware that it may be unreliable, or not perfectly up to date with the latest development of some cutting-edge technologies.

If your code would be in HTML4 I think we could morally say you could remove some of those meta tags in order to conform to the spec, but there is no definitive spec for HTML5, and so far there are so many features that are being experimented with that will/should end up in the spec, like the ability to use any name/content pairs in the meta tags, or having http-equiv as something acceptable, or, for that matter, a new syntax for meta tags, that your document will probably validate in the future.

So if validating is really important to you, you are in a bit of a rub since there's no precise or right way to validate HTML5 yet; removing those tags would make it validate against the w3c validator, but it would only "look" valid; even to people who believe that validating is more than just a badge.

Be that as it may, you could get rid of the

<meta http-equiv="content-language" content="en">

since you will probably specify the language (if not, please do) in many other attributes and places.